The Once And Future Kings
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: Many sins and every crime are from love of forbidden fruit. Which, though the sweetest on the vine, may just have a pit of pure poison that can damn you for all time. And down the years that pass you, to your sons and to their wives, the taste both sweet and bitter will outlast all of your lives. Kili/Tauriel, Fili/OC, Thorin/female OC, Thorin/Thranduil Cover by EmilyEretica.
1. Journeys End--

**THE ONCE AND FUTURE KINGS**

**Chapter One: Journeys End…**

"Aren't you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers."

Kili immediately regretted having said it, as soon as the words left his lips.

Granted, suavely inviting her to search down his trousers, as he could have had ANYTHING down them was a lot better than the alternative.

Like beckoning her over to the bars and informing her that he had the biggest cock this side of Mount Doom, even bigger than his brother's or his Uncle's, and they had won many a barroom bet and made many men twice their height cry over more than the loss of their money.

But why would Captain Tauriel want to know?

_Well, she doesn't want to know, you idiot, you want her to know!_

_As if that would make her decide to fall madly in love with you._

_For the son of one of the greatest poets of the Third Age, that was rather awkward._

Kili was inordinately proud of that; he may have been the youngest, and the least experienced, in battle, in life, and with women, but having the odd inch over the competition when the competition were his brother and uncle, well?

An advantage was an advantage.

Still, that was not the sort of thing you said to a woman.

To a she-Elf, at that.

Indeed, Kili had no idea why he had said anything about it at all; there was no suave way to talk to a woman about the dimensions of your warhammer.

It was embarrassing, juvenile and crude, and he wished he'd had his sword, so he could cut his own head off, for being such an idiot.

Tauriel raised an eyebrow.

"Or nothing?"

She smiled, and as she left, Kili smiled to himself, as well.

"That was horrible, little brother! You're lucky she likes you."

"Go fuck an orc!" Kili snapped.

He said it in Khuzdul, just in case Captain Tauriel disliked bad language.

Fili walked over to the bars.

"No, I mean it, Kili, I think our jailer really, really likes you."

"That's what you said about that girl at Rivendell. Who played the harp."

"That was a man."

"You know the one I mean! The one who was a girl!"

"Well? She let you lie with her, didn't she?"

"I could have been any man, as long as I wasn't an Elf! It had nothing to do with me!"

"Then I think that our jailer specifically likes you. And not just because you're not an Elf."

* * *

After they had their dinner, Fili lay down and went to sleep, and Kili could have.

For a hundred years, as tired as he was.

But he wanted to see if she would come back.

She had observed he was tall for a Dwarf, well, Tauriel was short, for an Elf.

Only a few inches taller than he was.

She did come back, and he embarrassed himself, again, saying the good-luck charm his mother had given him was cursed.

But then he resolved that he would stop acting like he thought Fili would, and just say what he felt he should.

"Where did you get your touchstone?"

"My mother gave it to me as a way to remember my promise."

"What promise?" Tauriel asked.

Kili shrugged

"That I will come back to her. She worries. She thinks I'm reckless."

"Are you?"

"Nah."

Which was a lie; Kili knew that he was incredibly reckless, apt to jump to conclusions, wore his heart on his sleeve and couldn't hide his emotions.

Also he was impulsive.

Especially when it came to women.

Fili was a rake; he might as well have been a prince of the Fair Folk as of the Dwarves, the way he had with women.

He could meet a girl, catch her eye, come to know her, spend the night with her, make an impression, and bid her farewell until they met again, all between evening and morning, and leave her happy to have met him, and happy to meet him again, even if it wasn't for months, or years.

Kili, on the other hand fell in love with every girl whose hand he tentatively held; and he always seemed to attract women who wanted to take advantage of him.

With the exception of the girl who played the harp at Rivendell, he didn't have casual affairs, but all of the affairs, alright, both of the affairs he did have ended horribly.

Leaving Kili, both times, with a broken but hopeful heart.

Actually, the harpist at Rivendell, she broke his heart, too.

And he'd only known her for a week.

"Well, it certainly sounds like I'm missing a party." Kili said, glumly

"It is the feast of starlight. All light is sacred to the Eldar. Wood elves love best the stars."

"I always thought it was a cold light. Remote and far away."

"It is memory. Precious and pure. Like your promise. I have walked there sometimes. Beyond the forest and up into the night. I have seen the world fall away and the white light forever fill the air."

Tauriel painted Kili a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, and he all-too-willingly went there with her.

"I saw the fire-moon once. It rose over the hill near Dunland. Huge. Red and gold it was that filled the sky. It was the strangest thing, because it made me think of my father. And a verse he wrote."

"Your father was a poet?"

"Yes. Probably the only Dwarf who's name you might recognize. Lothinwaen, son of Cain."

"Really? Your father was the great poet Lothinwaen? When I read his verses, it made me feel as though everything I heard about Dwarves couldn't be true. I have a book, a compilation of his works. Which verse?"

"Does you book have 'Lion of the Morning'? When I saw that fire moon, I thought of the last verse. _My forbidden love/Your black heart I treasure/Red gold lion of the morning/My forbidden love/Your very sight, pleasure/Though Hell is warning/I may be damned, o my brother/But for thee, o my lover/I will burn in hell or heaven/Red gold lion of the morning_."

"That whole poem was heartbreaking and beautiful."

"And?"

"And what?"

"You mean you're not going to say anything else?"

"There are many ways for a man to come to terms with what happened to your father. He decided that his brother did what he did out of love, and made up his mind to return that love, a thousandfold. That is beautiful, and heartbreaking."

"I hardly remember my father. Or my Uncle. The Great Beast. I was only four, when mother took us away. I know it's a strange thing to say about a man, especially a great warrior, a great archer, but my father was always very beautiful and very melancholy. He told me, once, that a man should have no shame in what he does for the sake of true love. He was very defiant about it. Meanwhile, it didn't seem odd to Fili and I. I'd wake up in the morning, and run into my parents' bedroom, and there they would be, all three of them, my father, my uncle, Vargbrand, and my Mum, asleep in bed. I thought that all married people slept in the same bed. I figured you wouldn't care, if all you were doing was sleeping in bed, with your brother and your wife. It was only after I found out about the rest of it that I understood where it was wrong."

"Do you think it was wrong?"

"Well, a man is meant to love his brother. If they loved each other too much, is that the worst of all possible sins? Yes, they were brothers. If they weren't brothers, I don't think it would have been as wrong. I mean, these things happen, don't they? Just nobody talks about it. And then there's my brother. He doesn't think anything you do while your trousers are down is wrong. He just doesn't fancy men, that's all."

"That's an enlightened attitude coming from a Dwarf."

"Fili isn't enlightened. He's a libertine, he says. I say he's a fookin' degenerate."

Kili laughed, and Tauriel laughed with him.

Then he realised what he'd just said.

"Excuse my language, Captain Tauriel!"

"I am a soldier, Prince Kili. I have heard, and said, worse. This very day, probably. Just between you and I, I've had a little too much to drink at our festival."

"I wish I could go to the festival. We heard you, in the wood, making merry. And we were all so hungry. Is the Elvenking going to give us food?"

"Of course he is. I am waiting to open your cells, when the servers come."

Their conversation was interrupted when five of the burliest Elves in the Elvenking's service brought Thorin Oakenshield, and got him locked in the room next to Kili and Fili's.

He wasn't going easy; by the time he was locked in two of the Elves were on the floor, reeling from blows, the other three were picking them up and fleeing, and Thorin had yanked open the oak door that was behind the barred door to his room, and he was standing by it, beating his fists against the bars, howling and cursing, in Westron and Khuzdul.

Balin, who was being held in a cell on the upper tier shouted over Thorin, telling him to calm down.

The only thing that seemed to calm Thorin down was seeing the look of fright on his ginger-haired jailer's face.

"You've no need to fear me, girl. I mean no harm to you." He told her, gruffly.

"He's alright, Captain Tauriel. He just has a terrible temper." Kili whispered.

"Jailer! Jailer, come here!"

Thorin Oakenshield's voice had such a commanding, kingly tone that Tauriel automatically obeyed him.

She thought it odd, the way he looked around his cell, which was rather more a room than a cell, how suspicious he was.

"What is this? What am I expected to do to keep this?" he demanded.

"Expected? What do you mean? Had you been thrown you in a dungeon you would have screamed that you were being treated unfairly, but when my King shows you kindness, you suspect that there is some base motive afoot?"

"Perhaps you do not, because you are young, and green and you do not know the son of an orc's warg, the snake who's coiled on that throne! Thranduil should not be throwing me, anywhere! How was it an assault on his kingdom that my party and I were nearly devoured by spiders, driven from the path, and that we have all but starved to death in the forest? Is it now a crime to be hungry and lost? Do you think that we would have made ourselves known to you, if we had any other recourse to cheat death?" Thorin demanded.

Tauriel had been wondering that, herself.

But she couldn't say that to Thorin.

"That is why you are not being put in a dungeon. As for what you are expected to do, my lord Thorin, you are expected to stay here, until you have thought better of the King's offer. Or until he thinks better of it, himself. You will have food, and if you need it, medicine. I will go now, but soon I will return, with your surcoat and cape, and clothes that are not hanging in tatters from you body. All that you will not have are your weapons."

"What about my nephews? And my men? Will they be treated with the same care?"

"Your nephews are lodged in a room like this one, because they are princes. They are right next door to you. The rest of your people are in cells, but they are not damp or dingy, and they will also be given food, and medicine, and treated well. My King's intent is not to punish you."

"I know what your King's intent is! And yours, Captain Tauriel. I am a hundred and ninety five years old, I know well the fascination Elf women have for the men of my race. I have seen the way you look at my nephew, and I do not think it is in pity that his tunics is in rags around his wrists and waist. You would do well to forget Kili. The dark-haired archer you have set your cap for. He is but a boy."

"Uncle!" Kili protested.

"Shut your pie hole, lad! Why don't you look before you leap, this time, so that you will not have your heart shattered, once again! You are your father's son, Kili, when it comes to love, and lower matters. You will end up like he did, if you don't watch your step!" Thorin warned.

Tauriel blushed.

The handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed archer, barrel-chested and well-made like his Uncle and tall for a Dwarf with strong long-fingered hands and hair on his wrists and curling out from his collar did not seem a boy to her.

Kili had neither spoken to her as a boy or looked at her the way a boy would.

He seemed, in all ways, to be nothing but a man.

She came to his defence.

"I think that your nephew is hardly a boy, Milord Thorin. He cannot be faulted because he has a soft heart, rather than just a hard head."

"A hard head, is it? Then even the boy sees your intent? Though I cannot blame you for it. Your King is one of the few Elves in Middle Earth with blood in his veins and not ice water, with his concubines and his near a score of bastards. Kili is a foolish boy. Leave him to his foolishness. His brother is far more worldly. Set your cap for him and he will knock it off, for you."

Tauriel bristled at Thorin's double-entendres.

"You order me about as if I should listen to you!"

"I am the King Under the Mountain. And I am responsible for the lad. Just because I am your prisoner makes me no less a king, and you no less a soldier."

Tauriel looked as if she would like to have said something to him about that, but she thought better, turned on her heel, and made a point of slamming the door as she locked him in.

She was walking the halls when King Thranduil came down, and opened Thorin's cell.

Tauriel hid in the shadows.

The drama between the two kings had been so much a part of her life for the past 200 years she could not help but listen, to see how it would pan out.

"Well, Thorin, we have met again. And I am not dead."

"That is because I am weak from war and starvation, and you have taken my sword!"

The two kings, Dwarf and Elf, stood, glaring at each other, in the small room.

"How do you like your accommodations? I have honored your rank, King Under the Mountain, and given you a room, rather than a cell. I have also given your nephews their own room. And your men are housed comfortably, in cells, but nothing damp or dark or dingy. You come to me from the wickedest part of the wood, lost from the path, starving and battered, and I have decided to feed you and clothe you, and send healers to tend to your wounds. I have treated you fairly. Can you not treat me fairly? Have you changed your mind, as regards my offer?"

"What are you offering me, Elf? You powdered, perfumed, shaven arse? You perverted ponce! You could not help but tremble when you saw me, as if all you recalled of the friendship, the love we once had for each other was the filth that you tempted me to, in your perversity! Well, you'll get nothing from me, Elf!" Thorin seethed.

Tauriel raised her hand to her mouth to keep the gasp in.

These two men, two kings, famously virile lovers and seducers of women, they had once been lovers, themselves?

She could hardly believe it.

But one thing was for sure, now she could not tear herself away.

"Do you dare speak to me of the love we had for each other, when we were boys? When we were as brothers? Before you violated my sister, got her with child, and abandoned her to her shame? And you speak of my perversity? You were my dearest friend, Thorin. My only crime was to be a stupid boy, who loved his friend too well! It was you, acting as you always do, motivated by your pride and your lust! Do you think that because I did the bending over, that makes you any less culpable, Thorin Oakenshield?"

"My fault? It was not my idea! You, you were the one, talking all that high minded nonsense! You...you tempted me, you bewitched me! You pretty words about our friendship and our honor, that a man could never love a woman the way he loved his dearest friend! It was your lust, not mine! Your idea, not mine! And you disguised it in terms of brotherly love and honor! Never in my life have I engaged in such perversity, again! Or even been tempted to! I've had a thousand women, if I've had one, and I'll bet I might have had a thousand men, only that is not what I wanted!"

"Nor have I, Thorin. I have a wife, a son and heir with her, five concubines, and ten children with them. With another on the way, and one grand-daughter. Unlike my fellow Elves in Rivendell and Lothlorien, I am not tempted to go to the Undying Lands. I enjoy this realm too much. But, in all these years, never have I made eyes at another man! And I have had many opportunities. Indeed, I am the King, I could have whoever I want for my pleasure. We Elves are civilized, we do not consider love between two men or two women a to be perversity. Just a preference. But it is a preference I do not seem to have."

"Do you think I do? I've had my share of offers from queers and ponces, and I've not been interested, either! It was a long time ago! I was a god damned boy, and Dwarf fathers keep their daughters locked up! You knew of my desperation, and you took advantage of me! You had some perverse curiosity and used me to satisfy it!"

"That is exactly what you did to my sister, a mere child, not even a thousand years old! You tempted her with fine words of love and honor, used her to satisfy your lusts, and threw her aside!"

"By all the gods of both our races, I hope the filth that pours from your mouth does not fly to their ears! I love your sister, as I have never loved any woman before or since, no matter the great number of women I have lain with! I would not have, had you let me marry Anorloth. Because you and I both know I wanted to marry her, and you, you jealous bastard, you wouldn't allow it! You have made your sister a whore and your nephew a bastard, because of your jealousy, because of your anger! How dare you say that I used her, how dare you throw garbage over the love I have carried in my heart for Anorloth, all my life!"

"What you carry for my sister, Thorin Oakenshield, is in your breeches, not in your heart! You have no heart, you are a venomous, greedy, vengeful, crafty old whoremaster, who would throw both his nephews and all of his kin into the fire from the jaws of a dragon just to satisfy your ambition. You would walk on your hands through a river of shit to get to your ocean of gold, and make your way to your throne on a wave made of the blood of your people, and mine, and every man, woman and child in Laketown. It matters nothing to you that you helped to build the place from nothing, you would see it destroyed for your vengeance! You know nothing of love, only of lust! Anorloth loves you most truly and you lust for her most foully. I do not approach the beds of my concubines with so little regard for them as you approach a woman, as nothing more than a series of orifices in which to deposit your seed. That is why I took her from your miserable cottage in Laketown, and it is why I would not let her come to you in New Belegost and it is why for fifty years I have locked Anorloth away from you, and not even let her see you, at all! The thought of you defiling her makes me want to retch and vomit! And to think, once that I loved you, Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror! To think that you were my dearest friend!"

"Do you think I loved you any less? My friend! My brother! How could you send me, my father, and my grandfather, how could you send us, and our people, to the four winds, to death, for some? How could you turn Anorloth out, into the ruins of a refugee camp on the lakeshore, in the wake of the dragon? Was it my fault that your father went over the water, and left you to be the king, before you were of age? Why take it out on me? Why would you betray me? It was jealousy, and nothing else! You were jealous of your own sister!"

"Jealous? How many days and nights did we know, and on how many did we lie together? One! I was not jealous of my sister that you loved her, I was furious at how you used her! You had her, and then you let your cousin at her, and you threw her aside, like she was some whore you could fuck and forget about! If you had to live, as I have, with Anorloth's grief, all these years, if you had to see, every day, how your son Thalin is torn between two worlds that can never be united, then you would understand betrayal!"

"I have done all you would permit, to be a father to my son! He must sneak from this place in the night to come to his kin; and then only for a few months can he abide with me before he must return here, to see that you have not turned against his mother, again! And as for Anorloth, I have done all you would allow, to do right by your sister! Who took him in, and Anorloth, when you cast them out, on your whim? I had nothing, then, but I gave of what I had for them!"

"Damn your thick Dwarf skull, Thorin, you had me! You only had to offer me your apologies, and I would have offered you mine! I would have given you my forgiveness, if I might have had yours! I would have helped your people, and given you my sister's hand! And you have not changed! Once more I offer you my help again, in exchange for a chest of gems that are as a drop of water in the ocean of your treasure, and again, you spit on me!"

Thorin spit on the ground.

"Come closer, and I will spit in your face! Do you think I forget that when I returned from losing all I had at Azanulbizar, and found that you had taken my wife and my son from me, too! Thirty years was a short time for you to wait, to have your final vengeance on me! What do you want from me, Thranduil? Do you expect I should trust your word? Do you want me to crawl? To beg? Do you think that you can cast the wrongs you have done to me and mine in the past in some rosy light on you that makes it look like it is my fault that you betrayed me? Do you expect tears? A kiss? If I had any love for you, it was spent when you betrayed me! I would see you dead, at my own hand, that is all I would give you!"

Thranduil smiled, mirthlessly.

"As I recall, Thorin, your love is never spent. You are like a bull."

"You may recall, laddie! For you'll have no more of me. Not even if you got on your knees and begged me for it. Like you once did." Thorin spat.

"What if I was to tell your company? Your nephews?"

"Tell them what? That you're a quivering, simpering nancy boy, and when I was young and horny and dumb enough to stick me cock in anything human with a hole in it, you liked to take it up the arse, and once I gave you what you wanted? You want to go and tell your prisoners how you bent over double at my feet and whored your fine Elvish mouth for me? Maybe it doesn't matter to your folk, but it does to mine, and they'd judge you to be the queer, not me!" Thorin thundered.

"What if I told them that you kissed me on the lips?"

"It would be a filthy lie!"

"No, it wouldn't."

Thorin was about to speak, again, and then, he laughed, maliciously.

And, in the crudest manner possible, he pulled aside his tunic and with his massive hand he grabbed the massive bulge at the front of his breeches and spat on the floor.

That was an insult, in any language.

"So, you speak to me of a fookin' bargain! Well, I have one for you! I will offer you more than jewels, something dearer to your perverse heart! If you will help me to finish my quest, Elf, I'll give you what you want. Every inch of it! And now that I am a grown man, there is more than you've had, before! You may keep the change, with my complements! And those of my father! And my grandfather!"

"Is there nothing in your hard old heart but contempt? Can you, this man who who offers me humiliation and rape as if it were love and friend ship, can you be the Thorin who was my brother? Whose blood I mingled with my own? I want you to admit that you had real feeling for me, Thorin. That we were comrades, so close, bound by such friendship, that there had to be nothing we did not share. Neither of us are, as you put it, queers. We were the best of friends. It was perfect, and it was pure, and I am sorry now, that I see you again, and only bitterness and hate remains between us. I see myself in your face, and I hate what we have both become!"

The Elvenking's voice broke with emotion, and Thorin's hatred softened, for a moment.

Tauriel peered around the corner, so that she could see inside the cell.

"I came and took my sister because she is not suited to a life of work and toil! She had grown so thin and drawn, and all thirty hard years were etched on her face! I took her home to save her life, and I had the decency to wait until you were away at war! I took my nephew because he is as much an Elf as a Dwarf and he knew nothing of his own people! Besides, some women are strong as men are. My sister was never one of them, and you know it!"

Thorin looked at his feet.

"I do."

"I hate to see myself in you! Your face is like the one I see every morning, in my mirror. A jaded, vicious, vengeful, bitter old man. How have we become the rotten bastards we are from the men we once were?

"Life is as great a bastard as either of us, that's how. You were my well-beloved friend, Thranduil. I will admit to that. And we did become brothers, in blood. A man is meant to love his friends. His brothers. Only we loved too much. As only boys can love, as men grown cannot."

"You did kiss me on the lips, Thorin. And said no man had a better friend than you did."

"Once, that was true."

"Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror. My dearest friend, my most hated enemy. How has it come to this?"

"Come to what? To you and I trying to murder each other with words, in your jail? We are men, now. Boys, no longer. We are kings. And the dragon came, and now I have come to kill him, where you will not. Or die, trying."

The moment had come.

The boys inside the two bitter old men, each crying out to embrace his friend, reached for each other, through the many years of hate, and death, and fire.

Taken up in that moment, Thorin reached for Thranduil's hand, and the Elvenking took it.

Without malice, without lust, without anger, and for only a moment, they were brothers, once more.

Only for a moment.

Tauriel felt her eyes fill up with tears.

Then, they parted.

"If you mean to keep me here, and you still expect me to trust you, you might give me a sign that you do not think of me as a lesser man. If I believed that your offer of help, in exchange for your gems was as one King to another, and not a trap, I might consider trusting your offer. Let me see her. I face death, Thranduil. Whether here in your halls, at the hands of the Orcs who pursue my every step, or from that filthy dragon. Let me know love once more, before I die. If you were ever my friend, my brother, if you care at all for your sister and your nephew? Let me see Anorloth."

Thranduil swore, in common Westron, and threw up his hands.

"Why should I not? If I do not give her permission, she will come to you, without it. For when there is a side to take, mine or yours, Anorloth picks yours. It is all my fault, never mind the dragon, and never does she think that even if Thalin could, never could she have survived the rigors of your people's wandering life. Rather I and all her kin shall be incinerated by a firedrake that I knew was too powerful for me to openly fight! Lo, for the past three hours, my sister has cried and screamed for you. She has begged me to let her come to you. And threatened me when I said I would not. She has torn at her hair and her clothes, and reminded me that you are Thalin's father, that you are her lord and husband, at least at common law. It is true, I have not let her leave this place to come to you, in fifty years. And if I want there to be peace in my household as long as you and your folk are here, then what else can I do? She will make a fool of me in front of all my people and all these Dwarves if I do not, so I will send her to you!"

"And how long will these negotiations between us take?" Thorin asked, sharply.

"Would you treat me and mine so well, if we came as beggars to New Belegost? I will continue to provide you and your men with food and shelter from the dangers of these woods, until I have decided what to do with you. Until you are all regained of your strength. Or until you decide what to do with yourselves. That much, I owe you."

"For that, I would grudgingly thank you. My dearest friend. My hated enemy."

"Not your most hated enemy, Thorin?"

"That is the dragon Smaug. I will see it dead, and laugh in it's dead face, and piss on it's stinking corpse!"

Thranduil smiled, in spite of himself.

"I almost believe that you will find a way."

"You know I will. My hate, too, is never spent."

* * *

For 600 years, Tauriel had been a good woman and a good soldier.

One of the things she was good at was not listening to whispers and rumors.

She knew that there were women of her kind, even married women, who complained that the blood in their husbands' veins had turned to cold clay and dust, and that they had might as well be made of marble, for as good as they were, as men.

And she paid no attention to the whispers behind her King's back that though he was beautiful, he was anything but cold, having taken his wife's five sisters as concubines and having six sons and four daughters with them.

They would laugh, and say that whoever had first put the kiss of mortal lust on Thranduil's lips, she must have been some woman, for his blood had, in some 3,000 years, never ceased to boil with it.

Tauriel was without a mother and father, they had been killed by orcs.

She grew up in Thranduil's household, raised, in committee by the queen's five sisters, along with his four daughters, and his six sons.

Thranduil's youngest child, his fourth son, fifth counting the Queen's son, Legolas, was a child of ten years old, and Legolas, who was 1,900 years old was his eldest.

Morgana and Amlugdagnir, better known by the Westron translation of his name, born one year apart were was the second and third youngest, at 609 and 610.

She was Tauriel's closest friend and companion, but Morgana was soon to be the third oldest because Aearonhen, Morgana's mother, was with child.

Aearonhen was also the mother of Estel, Thranduil's youngest son.

She had the same mother as the Queen and her sisters, but her father, the man who raised the Queen and her sisters was just that, a man, of Numenorian blood, a Ranger who retired from two hundred years of war to a ready-made wife and family.

The King credited her fecundity to having a mortal father, and among his brood of bastards, Morgana the Witch and Dragonkiller, the boisterous warrior, were his favorites.

Even his concubines would laugh and say, on the 7th day, the king rested, but Tauriel never laughed with them.

Because the man whom she had such feelings of love for did truly seem to have dust in his veins, and be made of marble.

Legolas was always a little embarrassed at his father's excesses, and he did not readily accept Thranduil's explanation that he intended his people to survive and prosper, into the next ten ages, even if he did have to see to it, himself.

Most embarrassing to Legolas, though was his aunt, Thranduil's half-sister, Anorloth.

Anorloth was also Oropher's daughter, but her mother had been a Dark Elf, who had some Dwarven blood.

Anorloth had a half-breed son, Thalin, whose father was Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror.

Thranduil was considering allowing his half sister to marry Thorin, despite the enmity that had developed between the former friends, but when Smaug came and made all the Dwarves homeless paupers, he refused the match, and turned his sister and his nephew out without a penny, when she reproached him for cowardice.

Anorloth and Thalin, lived with Thorin for thirty years, in which he became the blacksmith of Laketown, and kept one eye on his mountain.

When he marched off to war, Thranduil claimed Thalin for an Elf, and took his sister back to his palace, both against their will.

Meanwhile, Thorin Oakenshield had just lost his brother and his father and grandfather to a war against the orcs that many Silvani thought they should have fought in.

Tauriel still thought it cruel how her king told his former friend that he could marry Anorloth once he had built himself a suitable kingdom.

It only took Thorin thirty years to build New Belegost in the ruins of Belegost, in the Blue Mountains, and create a homeland for his people, and a suitable kingdom for an Elvin queen.

But then the Elvenking called New Belegost poor lodgings in exile, and said Thorin could only marry Anorloth when he had regainred the Lonely Mountain.

Thalin made frequent journeys, to the Iron Hills and the Blue Mountains, and in defiance of her brother's wishes, Anorloth went with him.

But, for the last fifty years, Thranduil had his sister under an enchantment such that she could not leave his kingdom.

Tauriel thought that was crueler yet, but she never said so.

Indeed, embarrassed though Legolas might have been to have a cousin who was half-Dwarrow, Tauriel well knew that most of the women who forsook their cold marble husbands went, deliberately, in search of either Rangers or Dwaves.

Particularly Dwarves.

Burly, hairy, barrel-chested, bearish and lusty, Dwarf men were said to be everything the men of the Elves weren't, and Tauriel tried not to listen to all those appalling jokes about the length and girth of their "warhammers".

Indeed, Tauriel rose to become the Captain of Thranduil's guards, outranking two of his sons and three of his daughters because she kept her mind on her duties, and tread the upward path.

Which the King rewarded.

But he also rewarded his daughter, Morgana, giving her the position of Court Seer.

Morgana, who was tall, raven-haired, blue eyed and built far more voluptuously than Tauriel was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sorceress.

Indeed, she was known as one of the two great human sorcerers in the North, and in all of Middle Earth.

Morgana of Mirkwood, who was the only woman in recorded history, and only one of two beings not a demigod in three ages to perform and survive the Rite of Odin, for which she, like the All-Father of the Aesir, gave an eye.

She gained great wisdom, and, among other powers, the ability to transform herself into a wolf, or a raven.

The only other sorcerer to be able to achieve that feat was the infamous Dwarf, Captain –General Lord Vargbrand, son of Cain, of the Iron Hills.

He was commonly known not only as the greatest general of the Dwarves of the Third Age, but as the Great Beast, and often called the Wickedest Man in the world.

Some said he was dead, and others claimed he could not die.

Vargbrand had married Princess Dis of the Blue Mountains, and had one son, Prince Fili, raised by Thorin Oakenshield to be his heir.

Morgana only knew of Vargbarnd by reputation, but in her travels, she had come to know his son, very well.

Tauriel often wished that Morgana would tell her more of Prince Fili's skill as a hunter, a scout and a warrior, and of his princely virtues, rather than speak of what a charming, handsome scoundrel he was, and how he was quite the great beast, himself.

No one trumpeted the prowess of a Dwarven lover louder than Morgana did, and her father looked the other way, in indulgence of his favorite daughter, on whose craft and council he depended on almost as much as that of Legolas, himself.

The Elvenking was often heard to comment that if Thorin Oakenshield ever came to retake his mountain, then Morgana might have Fili for a concubine of her own.

Which would never cease to make Legolas storm away in a huff.

In a court where everyone seemed to be very free with their favors, under a king who wished his people to be fruitful and multiply, and didn't seem to care if it was only that they were fruitful, Legolas held himself to the traditional moral standards of the Sindari.

When he was a very chaste man, Tauriel was obliged to be a very chaste woman, as a result.

The only finer model of piety and chastity in Thranduil's house was Legolas' aunt, Anorloth, who remained true to Thorin

Unlike Morgana, Anorloth had truly fallen in love with Thorin, and he with her.

She often spoke to Tauriel about their meeting.

Thranduil had held a great feast in honor of his friend, his blood-brother Thorin's birthday, his 21st, in the Great Hall of the Elvenking, and that is where Anorloth first saw Thorin Oakenshield.

She was a petite woman, a little over five foot, with red hair and violet eyes, and she was much younger than her brother.

She had been around Tauriel's age when she met Thorin.

And according to Anorloth, it was love at first sight, for both of them.

He danced with her all night, and when her brother was not looking, stole a kiss.

A kiss, Anorloth said, that breathed the fire of the forge of the Dwarrows' Mahal, himself into her body that had never ceased to burn.

"Dwarves love only once, Tauriel. That does not mean to say that one of their men will not tarry with other women. Some will, and some will not. But they only love once, and their love does not flag or fail. Even with Morgana and her junior Great Beast, you can tell by the way she speaks of him that he has inspired a loyalty in her, and even if he has a girl in every port, a dwarf will make sure he visits every port to see them. Women do not say they make the best lovers just because they are virile and manly. They make the best lovers for their nature, for Dwarves are capable of a greater capacity for love and for loyalty than any other race. Even if you meet a Dwarrow, casually, you will meet him again, if he has to walk on broken glass, barefoot, to find you. I will always love Thorin. When he comes to his Mountain I will be his Queen, and on the day he faces death, I will carry him, myself, to Valinor. Because I cannot bear the idea that we shall be parted in life, or in the afterlife."

Tauriel was moved by the depth of feeling that Anorloth had for Thorin Oakenshield.

And the dedication Thorin had, after so many years, to his wife and his son, whom he never forgot.

They seemed a noble people to Tauriel, a far better choice to be the masters of the Mountain than a filthy firedrake.

Which was why she could not understand why the King had them all imprisoned, and he didn't immediately make a move to ally himself with Thorin Oakenshield and march on the Mountain.

Instead, he shut each the Dwarves up in his jailhouse.

They were given a bed to sleep on, food and drink, and clean clothes, and those who were ill were allowed to have visits with the one called Oin, their doctor, and they would have the opportunity, once a week, to bathe.

It was a far better deal than they had starving in the forest, after being hunted and nearly eaten by spiders, but Tauriel could not understand why Thranduil would do such a thing.

Was it not in his interest that Thorin retake the mountain?

Could they not again, be allied?

Or would they let old wounds and the bitter hatred of two rotten old bastards ruin the last, best hopes of two great peoples.

Tauriel was at a loss for what could be done for it.

So, she decided that she must do her duty.

* * *

Thorin would not admit it to Thranduil, but he was exhausted.

And hurt.

And starving.

He sat on his bed, heavily, having used the last of his strength to spar with Thranduil.

His jailer soon returned with food.

A tray of food; it was like a miracle to the starving Dwarf.

Hot roast beef, and buttered potatoes, a bowl of fruit, and a loaf of bread, on a plate with cheese and butter.

It was all Thorin could do to keep his dignity, and not to fall on the food like an animal while she was still in the room.

After she left, Thorin tore hungrily into the meal; he could have devoured it all, but then he thought of Bilbo, who had been just as abused as he, only he was, though valiant, still a small Hobbit.

He saved some of the food, wrapped in a cloth napkin, and hid it under his bed.

Almost as soon as he had done so, Thranduil's captain admitted Morgana the Witch, who accompanied servants in livery that carried an alabaster tub, filled with hot water.

Morgana the Witch was known all the way to the other side of Middle Earth as a powerful sorceress who had been the ruin of many men.

"Do you not have servants to do menial tasks, in this palace?" Thorin asked.

Morgana the Witch stepped closer to Thorin than a woman should to a man she was not well known to.

She bowed low, at the waist.

"I would not call it a menial task to serve you, my Lord Thorin. Let me take those filthy rags and burn them."

"I have served you, Morgana, and been served by you. One night in the midst of such magic is enough for me. I am far more superstitious than my nephew, Fili."

Before Morgana could reply, a red-haired, grey-eyed Silvani, with the beaytifully impish face of a true daughter of Danu, very short for an Elf, shorter than Thorin, but dressed in clothes as splendid as the Elvenking's strode into his cell with an air of majesty.

It seemed to Thorin that in the last fifty years, since she had bourne the dangers of the world to come and meet him, Anorloth had grown more beautiful.

More strong.

"If my lord and husband needs help with his bath, Morgana, I will take care of him. You may go. Now."

Thorin's heart leapt into his mouth, and he was rooted to the spot.

"My lady, the King says I must lock this door, and not unlock it until the wee hours, when I come to check on the prisoners." Tauriel interrupted.

"That suits me, Tauriel. I have no desire to leave this room, so soon."

Tauriel bowed her head, and left Thorin's cell, locking the door.

Taking Morgana with her.

Anorloth walked over to Thorin, and took both of his large, hard, powerful hands in her small, white slim ones.

Freckled on the back.

She had freckles on her arms, too, and on her back, but not on her face.

Anorloth bowed, all the way to her waist.

"I see you, Sunflower. But I do not believe my eyes." He said.

"I am ever at your service, my lord and husband." She said, in Khuzdul.

When Anorloth lifted her head again, there were tears in her eyes.

Thorin put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her, fierecely.

She made a tiny little sound, like the coo of a bird, and melded herself into the heat of his embrace.

Even after his breath was spent, he held his Anorloth tightly against his chest, as if someone was going to come and take her away.

"Though I dream of you every night, Thorin, even before I have fallen asleep, still I had forgotten just what a man you are! I knew that you would come! Not just for Thalin and I, but for Thror's Mountain. Your Mountain. I never doubted you." She continued, in his language.

"Even though I have come as a beggar in rags? Even though you come to me in a cell, at your brother's mercy?"

Thorin pushed himself away from her, embarrassed that he was ragged and filthy and hurt.

Anorloth laughed, sadly, and poured some healing salts into Thorin's bathwater.

"Sometimes it seems to me as if half the world is at my brother's mercy. He has become far less great a man than he assumes he is. Thranduil is not the man you remember. Since he withdrew himself from the stage of the world, what has he done? You have done much! You made a home for me and Thalin, and your close kin in Laketown, for thirty years, then you made war on the orcs, and they have still not recovered in their numbers from the beating they took from the Dwarves. Even after my brother kidnapped us, and you lost almost all your kin, were you defeated, as he is? No! Not Thorin Oakenshield! You became a great king, rebuilt New Belegost and made it your people's new homeland, and then took it upon yourself to raise both your sister's sons. And what has my brother done? Not much."

Thorin took off his ragged tunic, and when he unlaced his breeches and tried to pull them down, they, and his loincloth, fell in pieces on the ground.

"Poor lodgings in exile, that's all they are. I am a mean, hard old man, with a filthy mouth and worse habits. Whoremaster and heartbreaker. A greedy Dwarrow blacksmith, with rheumatism in his back and his knee, reaching with both hands for every piece of gold and piece of arse he can grasp. That is the ugly truth, my beautiful Sunflower."

Thorin eased himself into his bathwater.

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the rim of the tub.

"Now that I've had a decent meal, all I need is a bath, and I'll be my old, miserable self, again."

Anorloth sat down beside the tub, and started to undo his braids.

"You do flatter yourself, don't you, Husband?' she joked.

That caught Thorin off guard, and he laughed.

"I remember how I would come home to our miserable heap of shite shack at night, filthy from the forge, and you would leave Thalin in Dis' care and jump into my arms. It's my faults you love me for, and you would not have me any other way!"

"I have thought of a lot of ways, these past fifty years. I have had little else to do, but sew, and wlak in Mirkwood, and wait for Thalin to come home and tell me what is going on in the world. Little my brother cares to know! He styles himself a Great Elvin Lord, like the Warrior Kings of the First Age, but all he has done for almost two hundred years is fornicate and fulminate. His dynastic ambition terminates at the end of his cock, and his horizons are not far beyond. He doesn't seem to understand that just because there will be ten, or 12, or twenty more of his direct descendants in the world, if it all burns in the eye of the Enemy, he will burn, too. We were the ruin of him, Thorin. You and I."

"Your brother ruined himself. With his jealousy. I feel sorry for his children, and when he has them, his grandchildren, who will either die or be forgotten here, with him. But you and Thalin will not be among them."

"I hate to abandon him. But what can I do, when he is too proud, and too stubborn, to see the error of his ways? Soon you will be home, King Under the Mountain. And Thalin and I , we too will be home, at last."

"You speak Khuzdul as if you were born in my grandfather's halls."

"My grandfather was, or so my mother said. And my great brother, the Elvenking, son of a High Elf of Rivendell, he will never live down that his father married a Dark Elf, who was the daughter of a common Dwarrow tinker."

"And his sister is the wife, at common law, of a Dwarrow blacksmith. Like mother, like daughter." Thorin laughed.

"I am not like my mother. I have never been touched by the narrow, hairless white hands of one of my own kind."

"It is well you were not. The men of your kind are strange. At least your bastard brother remains a man, and not a marble saint, whose motives no man with blood in his veins can know. Still, if Elrond has the last Homely House, then this is The Last Disorderly House! Your brother! Married at two hundred, a boy by the standards of your people! A father the same year as he was married, and two hundred years ago he was wife to six and father to seven more! A son ten years old and a concubine with child, and he cares not what father or mother his brood of rutting bastards bear their children on, as long as they come under his dominion! If that witch niece of yours connives to get my reckless nephew to fill her belly with Thranduil's first grandchild, I'll let an Heir or Heiress of Durin be raised in this place over my dead body!"

"Thorin, have you really so much moral authority to speak from?" Anorloth asked.

Thorin dropped the soap into the bottom of the tub, picked it up, and gestured at his common-law wife with it.

"I have no bastards, and no mad desire to fill the world, or outfit my kingdom with them! Thor's mighty hammer, look where that spider bit me! Fookin' blood of my fathers, had it got me an inch to the left, I would have to be the Queen Under the Mountain!"

He scrubbed gently at the bite, and looked at it with great worry.

Anorloth could no longer hold her laughter in.

"What?" Thorin demanded.

"You! You and Thranduil! You were such good friends, like brothers, because, by my faith you are the same man! You will not reconcile because you are both stubborn, stiff-necked bastards, each of whom expects the other is secretly after his arse, but fairly little do you think of your arses for the entirety of the universe for you both revolves around what's in front, rather than in back! And when one of you dies, though the other has spent two hundred years shouting that queer bastard, he was never my friend and only after my arse, the one who lives will weep and tear his clothes and scream that he has lost his brother!"

"You do not know the shame, Anorloth! The shame your brother and I both carry!"

Thorin got out of the alabaster tub, and took the towel that Anorloth offered him.

"Shame? What shame? The truth is that neither of you knows whether you did, or did not. We drank pure Sindari absinthe together, you and Thraduil and I. On many nights. After almost two hundred years, who can remember anything?"

"You think that I don't know it? How many nights do none of us remember? The gods only know what we did. Or with whom? We were wild in those days, I know, wild and pampered and privileged and free to indulge our every whim. Your brother was older, it's true he grew up before we did and I cannot blame him much for refusing to believe that his sister's 24-year-old lover who was only sober while he was asleep and who had laid siege to every merry widow in Erebor and every unfaithful wife in his kingdom was marriage material. But it has been two hundred years, since! 30 years later, I was a responsible man, with a trade and a home that he built with his won hands, in a city he helped to raise from nothing! 60 years later I was the lord of New Belegost! Why then, could you not be my wife? Why did your brother let my people die and my kingdom burn when the dragon came? Was he so fond of his pretty face that he was afraid Smaug would give him more hideous scars, that no amount of magic could conceal? Where was Thranduil at Azanulbizar? There was no dragon there! His son, Dragonkiller, fought with us. Where was his army? What did I to do him, to make your brother hate me, so?"

"Other than seducing his sister and giving her a half-breed child? You wouldn't get his jewels for him. Those jewels were not Thror's to take. They belonged to Thranduil's mother. They are all he has left of Morgan le Fay. At least I know I will see my mother again, in the Undying Lands. Our father is dead. His mother is dead. Full-blooded Elves do not have the same kind of souls that mortals have. Dead is dead, Thorin. Forever."

"Do you think that I should have lost my father, my grandfather, my home and my birthright, that thousands of my people should have been burnt or eaten alive and yens of thousands scattered to the winds, because of it?" Thorin asked.

He threw the towel on the stone floor, angrily, standing with his hands on his hips, demanding an answer.

Anorloth looked him in the eye, and put her hand on the side of his face.

"No. My brother was wrong, then, to abandon you. Wrong now, to imprison you. I would like to see you two reconciled. But I can see why that is beyond hope. Let me take these filthy rags, and burn them."

That light came into Thorin's eyes, that mad light of deep hunger that drove the men of his line insane.

Thorin was almost two hundred years old, that was quite old, even for a Dwarf.

But he was not shriveled or bowed, or graying, he was a finer, stronger, and more handsome man than she had ever known him to be.

Perhaps there was magic in the madness of the Heirs of Durin; maybe they really did burn bright and hot with the fires of Mahal's forge, until their savage gods of the Aesir took them, through, batlle, to the halls of Valhalla.

"Later, wife, you can worry about my dirty clothes I've thrown on the floor. That dress you wear, I want to see it beside them. Before I make it as ragged. I have waited fifty years, and not one night has gone by that I have not thought of you. I will wait no longer." He growled.

"How can you still be mad, and impulsive, after all these years? Will you snort, and stamp your feet, and flare your nostrils, like you did, fifty years ago, when I came to the Blue Mountains and surprised you in your bedchamber? Tear it, my lord and husband. My burly, bonny, raging bull!"

* * *

"I wonder what's keeping Morgana?"

"Shut up, Fili."

"Don't sulk, little brother. Uncle and I aren't the only ones in line for a little jailhouse romance with the lovely Elvin ladies of Mirkwood. Keep reciting your Da's poetry, and all that about my Da, and Mum, and their star-crossed love and tragic death, and you'll be well in!"

"You can even make a joke of our fathers being dead?"

"Wargshite! Why does Mum go to the Iron Hills every summer?"

"To visit their graves."

"For two months? If I live to see our great-grandfather's halls, I am going to the Iron Hills, first thing."

"You've been saying that since we were children."

"I know my Da. And yours. I saw them have fights that put that last one to shame! Before you were born-"

"I know. Your Da threw my Da through a stained-glass window, and my Da fell from the tall tower to the smaller one, and when your Da ran out to see if he was still alive, my Da stood up, shook the glass out of his hair and punched your Da out cold."

"They're not dead, as I live and breathe, Kili! Maybe they would have made rotten fathers, but we are men, now, what bad influence could our fathers have on us?"

"On you? None. How could you be worse?"

"Thank you, little brother."

"Fili?"

"Hmmm?"

"Have you ever made a woman scream, like that?"

"Not quite like that. Not yet. But with another 70 or 80 years of practice, who knows?"

* * *

Much later in the night, Thorin fell into a deep, sated slumber, like a drunken man.

He almost didn't awaken at the sound of the small, rather embarrassed voice at the bars of his cell.

"Thorin? Erm, Thorin? It's, ah, me. It's Bilbo. I'm not looking, just, erm, well, I'm here."

"I hear you, burglar. Wait a moment. For I have been, this night, in the midst of Valinor."

Laughing at his own joke, Thorin got the plate with the napkin full of food from under his bed.

He opened the oak inner door and passed the plate through the bars, to Bilbo.

Who was looking at him, with an expression of mingled horror and awe on his face.

"Take the plate, burglar. Before you are spotted."

"I'm terribly sorry, Thorin. And it's not as if I'm…queer, or anything. It's only, well I…it's no wonder you fellows are so popular with these Elf women! With most women, I would expect. That is, I mean, well, you certainly are tall, for a Dwarf, aren't you?"

Bilbo chuckled, and then looked under the napkin.

"Roast beef and baked potatoes. With bread and cheese. Well, that's very nice! Of course if it was fried orc, it would be very nice, about now."

Then he peered through the bars.

"Your good wife, she is still alive, isn't she?" he joked.

Mindful of the fact that Bilbo was a good foot and a half shorter than him, Thorin grabbed his pillow, and held it in front of his abject nakedness.

"I have not yet slain a woman with my hammer, Hobbit." He laughed.

"Well you probably could if you hit one over the head hard enough. And I have met your son. He's agreed to hide me in his rooms. He looks just like you. Only taller and ginger. Like his mother, I suppose."

"Anorloth is only four foot nine."

"Well, that explains a lot. But that King Thranduil, he's over six foot I daresay, so I suppose that's why your son's so tall. Takes after his Uncle. Speaking of taking after his uncle, I think Kili is beginning to follow in your footsteps. I don't mean to tell tales out of school, but your jailer seems awfully interested in watching Kili. He was telling her all about his famous father. And reciting love poems to her. And that hard-eyed warrior, well she looked positively dewy over it! Then again, so did Kili."

"Maybe he'll find a way to hammer us out of these bars, before you do, Bilbo."

It took Bilbo a moment to get that joke, and then he and Thorin both laughed.

Bilbo sat down, and sliced off a piece of bread and a piece of cheese, with Sting.

"And what about that giant woman, the black-haired one, with one eye? By Yavanna's garters, pardon my Elvish, that is the prettiest girl with one eye that I have ever seen! If I had a stepstool, mind you, and a very large vial of love potion to confound her with, well, I could do her quite a mischief!"

"You would need neither to win her favor, burglar. That is Morgana. The witch. She gave her eye performing the Rite of Odin. Odin, who made Mahal, who made us. In exchange, she has gained a piece of the All-Father's wisdom. And the ability to change her skin, and become a raven, or a wolf. She is the most powerful sorceress in Middle Earth since the First Age, when Morgana Le Fay, her grandmother, was the Queen of all the Northern Lands. Of Men and Elves, alike."

"You mean the Morgan leFay? The daughter of Danu? The actual Morgan le Fay?"

"Thranduil's mother."

"I see. And out of all the possible men in the world she's mad about our Fili?"

"Morgana has had all the possible men in the world! And Elves. And Dwarves. If she has known men of the Shire, she's had them, too! If she has not, well, now's your chance, Bilbo! In 610 years, the Witch of Mirkwood has not had many lonely nights. She would fuck an orc out of sheer curiosity, if she could find one with a cock that wasn't bent and knobbly. Fili follows his own father, Vargbrand, the Great Beast, down that well-trodden path. The woman ought to shave her beard into the shape of a welcome mat! She's not all she seems, Bilbo. When I was a young man, and I had her, she was a foul-mouthed, insatiable, ravenous whore with a great sloppy cunny. That said, once she's got you in it, by Thor's brass bollocks, it's like an iron fist in a velvet glove, the way that witch can swink! And she's got the Devil's own mouth on her, that's true, enough. Tits as big as a man's head, too. And, of course, she looks with special favor on my nephew. Two peas in a pod, my nephew and Morgana."

"Why did they call him "the Great Beast'? Fili's father, I mean."

"Vargbrand is the greatest general of the Third Age. But he has a taste for torture. The orcs who he would capture that he allowed to go back to their fellows gave him that name. Of course, they may call him the great beast, also because he'd fuck anything human that would agree it to it, as long as the person wasn't not deformed, or a child."

"And your sister thought he would make a good husband?"

"That is what I told her. A sadist, a sorcerer and a sodomite to boot! But she told me that she loved him! Why should she have cared if he was good looking, the man was an animal! You know who it was he claimed to love, other than my sister. His own brother. His younger brother. Can you imagine that? Fucking your own brother? What does it matter if he was pretty as a woman? A man shouldn't even think such things about his brother, let alone act on them! Fookin' animal!"

"That is truly disgusting."

"Not to Vargbrand and Lothinwaen! They were in love! Wargshite! Poor Lothinwaen. Kili's father. He didn't know any better, did he? He was a lad of fifteen and his brother was a man thirty years old when he battened onto him. He wrote beautiful love poems for his brother as well as Dis. Lothinwaen loved them both; he truly had a poet's soul and a warrior's heart. As Kili does. But my sister thought they were both husband material. Madly in love with both of them. A pervert and a poet. She still goes to visit them, in the Iron Hills. I have told the lads they are both dead, for I wanted them to have no hand in the raising of my sister sons. Those were the condition for Dis to come home to the Blue Mountains, for me to raise Fili and Kili."

"I shouldn't wonder you did! Still if that Morgana has a special liking for Fili, maybe he can hammer us a way out of here."

"I would put my trust in you, Bilbo, rather than my nephews' art with women. They are boys. Put a pretty Elvish girl in front of them who wants to ride them all the way to Mordor with their bollocks for a seat cushion, and back again, and escape will be the last thing on their minds."

"Yes, well, I won't be distracted by these ladies. Primarily because I cannot seem to locate a stepstool. Honestly, Thorin, I don't know how I will get you out of this fortress, but I shall find a way. Now, I think I'll go and say hello to the other fellows. Then I'll find my way back to Thalin's rooms, have my dinner and just die for a little while."

"I have faith in you, Mr. Baggins."

"One more thing, though. What in Middle Earth did you say to Thranduil, to make him so angry at you? I didn't catch it, my Khuzdul is not good."

"I told him that he could burn in hell."

"No, I got that part. You've said that to me often enough. And you didn't tell the Elvenking to go fuck himself, because I've heard a lot of that one, too. I actually know a lot of bad language in Khuzdul, thanks to this journey. I know "Eat shit and die", and, "Piss on you", and " son of an orc's warg" and "Fuck off" and "fuck you" and all the variations on that theme. I know all the naughty bits, of course. But I don't know that one."

"I told Thranduil that if he did not like the way our meeting had gone…"

"I got that part. You said it in Westron, after all."

"…that he could suck my cock, and make it a love story."

Bilbo's lip trembled, but he did not laugh.

"Your command of profanity, in any language, Thorin, is truly staggering."

"Thank you, burglar. Mahal's beard, it is the witch! Hide in the shadows, Bilbo. If she sees you, she'll might keep you for a pet, like a pink poodle on a gold chain."

"That might not be the worst thing that could befall me."

They both laughed at that, but Bilbo made himself scarce, anyway.

* * *

With Tauriel walking after her, asking what she was about, Morgana made her appearance, with a purple velvet robe, trimmed and lined in lush fur, over her arm.

She was wearing a filmy purple nightdress that left little to the imagination, and every Dwarf in the jailhouse was at the bars of his cell to have a look.

"Fili, my sweet prince, my very great beast, where are you?" she cried.

"I'm in the last cell, Morgana!"

Dramatically, for Morgana did everything dramatically, Morgana flung herself against the bars of Fili's cell, seemingly unmindful that her bosom had almost completely slipped from her nightdress.

Considering that Fili, though also tall for a Dwarf, was about five feet and three to Morgana's six feet, when she thrust her arms through the bars and pulled him into them, the Dwarf prince had the opportunity to observe the faultiness of Morgana's nightdress up close and personal.

"Durin's shorter and curlier beard, Morgana, you can't know how good it is to see you again!" He said.

The other Dwarrows laughed.

"What are you doing, locked in our jailhouse? Has my father lost his mind?"

Morgana tucked herself back into her nightdress and turned to her friend.

"Tauriel, unlock this door."

"But Morgana, these are your father's prisoners."

"The other 12 Dwarrows are my father's prisoners. Prince Fili is my prisoner. And I will set him free when my father sets his companions free."

"And you will tell our King that, when he asks me where one of his prisoners is? And how will you keep Prince Fili from escaping?"

"You've got to be joking, girl? Do you think he's going to want to escape?" Dwalin shouted.

Fili winked at Tauriel.

"Come to Morgana's room after she's fallen asleep, Captain Tauriel, and I'll show you."

The other Dwarves shouted and hooted, but Kili came to the bars of his cell, angrily.

"You leave her alone, Fili! Or when I get out of here I'll give you the worst fookin' beating you've ever had!" he insisted.

"I was only kidding, little brother. My dance card is going to be quite full." Fili assured him.

Meanwhile, Morgana unlocked Fili's cell with her own keys, and gave him the fine robe.

"So that no one sees the Heir to the King Under the Mountain in filthy rags."

"I meant it, Morgana. You cannot know what I have been through!"

"You can tell me all about it, as I draw you a bath, and tend to your wounds…and your every whim. No matter how foul, how base or how absolutely filthy."

"Mahal's beard, Morgana, you are the Devil's Own Whore!"

"And you are his own son, Fili. And a very great beast, yourself."

Fili picked Morgana up, like she was made of feathers, and threw all six feet of her over his shoulder.

"Prepare to meet your destiny, witch!"

Morgana shrieked a laugh of orgiastic glee, as Fili carried her up the hidden staircase she had come down.

Then again, Dwarves were very strong.

Very strong, indeed.

* * *

"You did say, Thorin, that the witch was partial to any man? Any male person, of any race? At all?" Bilbo asked.

"Go and find yourself a stepstool, burglar. But you would not want to ride into that battle without a sheath for your sword. And take a bath after. In hot water. The hottest you can bear. With lye soap."

* * *

Tauriel walked the halls for another hour, shining a light into all the cells, finding all the Dwarves asleep in their beds.

And Anorloth asleep in the strong arms of Thorin Oakenshield, her lord and husband.

But when she got to Kili's cell, she found him awake.

He had taken off his tunic, and was standing in the back of his cell, in his boots and breeches, bare to the waist, furiously scratching at a series of large itch welts, the size of gold pieces.

There were three on his side, one on his chest, and one on his back that he could not reach.

He swore extravagantly in Westron, and contorted himself with the effort, and had Tauriel not been staring at him, she might have laughed.

But Tauriel was staring.

In his tunic, it appeared that Kili would be barrel-chested, muscular and well made.

Out of it, his strength was apparent.

He had whorls of silky black hair all over his chest, that thinned across his torso and then thickened again where they disappeared below the waistband of his trousers.

His arms were as well-muscled as an Elvish man's legs, and they too were covered in the same whorls of silky black hair.

The muscles in his broad back moved and rippled with his attempts to reach the welt, and when he finally got to scratch it, he let out a sigh of satisfaction.

Tauriel wondered if it was love she was feeling, or just lust.

But whatever it was, she did not feel good or quiet, or chaste; she had this wonderful, awful feeling of hunger, something completely different for what she felt for Leglolas.

It was like the hunger for food after a long fast, or water after a long walk.

Something that was animal and instinctual, but it did not make her feel low and base, but rather more alive than she had for a long time.

As alive if she was made of starlight.

She suddenly understood why Anorloth could never forget Thorin, and why Morgana came in the middle of the night with a fine robe for Fili, and why even her King, a man whose preference was exclusively and excessively to women would hunger, only once, as she now hungered.

To have the very fires of Mahal's forged breathed into her soul, from the kiss on her lips of one of the Heirs of Durin.

Then her eyes met Kili's.

She was embarrassed, but he only smiled, warmly.

He was happy to see her.

"Can you not sleep, Prince Kili?"

"Not when I have been bitten all over by those god-damned, accused son of an orc's warg fookin' spiders!"

Kili contorted himself, scratching, again.

Tauriel blushed and turned her head away.

Without his tunic on, his breeches left very little to the imagination.

_Well, if I searched down his trousers, I would have found quite a weapon._

She felt hot blood rise into her chest and her face, and laughed them away.

"You cannot suffer so, from such a small thing, a fine strong man like you!" she said.

Kili smiled at the complement, and blushed, just a little.

"I am exhausted, but there is no way that I can lie on my bed that I'm not tormented! They are no small thing! Oin put some kind of ointment on these bites, but they itch and they burn. I've got four more of them…elsewhere, and they're driving me mad!"

"I know the sting is maddening. We have a remedy for the bites of the spiders. I was bitten too, in the fight and I have a jar of it in my pocket, to put on when the bites madden me. Here."

Tauriel passed the jar of ointment through the bars.

Kili unscrewed it, sniffed the contents and put some on the bites on his side.

"It works! It works! Mahal's hammer, it works."

He put a little more ointment on his fingers, and them put his hand down the back of his pants, and finally, he gave her back the jar, turned his back to her and put it… somewhere else.

"The beasts, they did not bite you…there…did they?"

"One bit me on the inside of my thigh. That is the worst….and now I can't feel it. At last! Peace!"

He turned around again, tying the laces of his breeches.

"Now I can put my clean clothes on, tomorrow, and tonight I can sleep. Thank you, Lady Tauriel. I suppose if you would have searched down my trousers, you would only have found a bunch of spider bites."

They both laughed, and bid each other good-night.

* * *

Tauriel finally went to her rooms.

Unfortunately for her, Tauriel's rooms in the King's household adjoined Morgana's.

And she and Prince Fili were putting on such a performance you might think the couple in the next room were the Devil and the Whore of Babylon.

Through the wall came such an appalling racket that Tauriel left her bedroom and went into her sitting room with her blankets and slept on the divan.

They raised such a terrible racket that she heard the King, who must have been in Morgana's mother's rooms, slamming the door of that chamber and pounding on Morgana's.

"Are you being murdered in there, girl, to make you scream, so? And what have you taken to your bed, a bellowing ape? I am your father, do you think I can sleep in peace through such racket, knowing full well what you're about? I realize it is beyond your capacity, witch, to be chaste, but could you at least not wake the whole household? You sound as if you were being murdered with a dull knife! The next time I come to this door it will be to break it down, with an axe in my hand, and I shall use the handle of it to beat your suitor back to whatever part of this palace he belongs in!"

The door of Morgana's mother's room slammed, again, and after that things were quiet enough that Tauriel could go back and sleep in her own bed.

But she did not sleep.

She lay awake, thinking of Kili.

Whispering to the dark.

Paraphrasing Lothinwaen's words, and understanding just what he meant.

"My forbidden love, your stout heart I treasure. My raven-hair'd lion of the morning. My forbidden love, your very sight, my pleasure. Though Hell is warning. I may be damned, Dwarrow lover, but for thee, and no other. I will burn in hell or heaven; my raven hair'd lion of the morning."

**(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Who wants more forbidden love in the Last Disorderly House? You do, of course! Is Thranduil really jealous of his own sister? Is Anorloth the only one in the family that Thorin desires? Will Thranduil of the six wives stoop so low as to make him deliver on his offer, whether Thorin wants to, or not? Or will Morgana wear down his will, and land Thorin in trouble with Thranduil and Anorloth? And what of faithful Anorloth? Can she and Thalin, son of Thorin, conspire with Bilbo to free the company? Can Fili persuade Morgana, with his mithril tongue and mighty hammer, to help the company escape? And what of Kili and Tauriel, our star-crossed lovers? Will they, or won't they? Could this be, at long last, love? Will Thorin and Anorloth's tragic history repeat itself with Kili and Tauriel And what happens when Legolas discovers that his lady fair of some 500 years is flirting with a captive Dwarf-prince? And, last but not least, will there be lemons in the next chapter, or will I continue with the lemon-scented prose? Tune into Chapter Two, coming soon, and find out for yourself!)**


	2. --In Lovers Meeting

**Chapter Two: …In Lovers Meeting**

First thing in the morning, before Tauriel's shift ended, she witnessed something that really made her think twice about any moral authority her King had over his prisoners.

Anorloth, in her dressing gown, left Thorin's cell, and went back up into the palace via the secret stair.

That wasn't remarkable.

What happened when she came back was.

Dragonkiller, or as his family often called him "Dagnir" was behind her, carrying a barrel of ale.

Anorloth had a large bowl of fruit in one hand and a sack over her shoulder.

"Good morning, Tauriel." She said, pleasant as ever.

She used her keys to unlock the barred door of Kili and Fili's room, put down the bowl and the sack and knocked on the oak door.

"Whozit?" said a sleepy voice, probably Fili's.

"It's your aunt who hasn't seen you in 50 years!"

Prince Fili unlocked the door in a hurry, and they embraced, like long-lost relatives.

"Look at you, Fili! You're taller than me and you're beard's come in! When did you become a man?"

"A long time before Kili did."

Kili staggered over to the door, yawning.

But when he saw Anorloth, he embraced her, too.

She looked a little flustered when he let her go.

"Eru's light, Kili, I almost thought that you were your Uncle Thorin! You look just like him, when he was your age! I can't believe the way you boys have grown! Let me go for a minute, I have something for you."

Anorloth handed Kili the sack and Fili the bowl of fruit.

"Whatever you lads are being fed, I'm sure you're starving. Some of my brother's people, they eat as much as birds do, and I know how hungry growing boys get."

"Leave those oranges alone. We ought to give some of these oranges to Ori. He has a bad cold." Fili told Kili.

"Ori! Ori is here? Why, he's not even seventy yet, is he?"

"Sixty-two." Kili told her.

Meanwhile, Dagnir had carried the keg up to the second tier.

The Dwarves knew him by name, too, and they seemed glad to see him and the keg of ale.

He and Dwalin even butted heads.

"He's not alone, is he?" Anorloth asked about young Ori.

"No, Nori and Dori are with him."

"Why did you bring Ori along? Couldn't he have stayed home? With your wife?" Anorloth shouted.

"We tried to leave him at home. He followed us." Nori yelled back.

"Can I have a few of those oranges, lads? I'll bring you some more. Wait a bit."

Then Anorloth went up to the second tier, and unlocked the cell that Dori, Nori and Ori were in.

Tauriel followed her upstairs, but not into the cell.

Anorloth went right in and knelt down beside Ori's bed.

"Do I look like a man, now, too, Lady Anorloth." Ori asked her.

"A sick man, Ori. Are you hungry?"

"A little. But my throat hurts too much to swallow that whole orange."

"I'll squeeze it for him, milady. I'll put the powder Oin wants him to drink in the juice. It'll go down better than it would in water." Dori volunteered.

"I'll make sure he gets some chicken soup for lunch. I'll put some diced kingsfoil on the top. It's green, Ori, and you had better eat it!"

"I don't mind a little green, milady. I'm just not about to eat any food that's all green." Ori volunteered.

Before Tauriel's wondering eyes, Anorloth said hello to all the Dwarves, in turn, and they all greeted her as "milady."

Except for Dwalin and Balin, who both, like Thorin, called her "Ani"

Dwalin seemed especially informal, and it made Tauriel wonder if he was the cousin of Thorin's that the Elvenking had accused the King Under the Mountain of sharing his sister with.

Anorloth went back into the cell occupied by Ori, Dori and Nori, and squeezed the oranges for Ori.

She muttered something in Quenya over the juice before she gave the glass to the young Dwarf.

"If he does not get better, I will make sure that he's moved upstairs, to a room where he can get some fresh air and sunshine." She promised Dori and Nori.

Tauriel went with her, up the main staircase to the palace, because she had something to say.

* * *

"These Dwarves, Anorloth, they are your people, too. As much as we are. Your husband, your nephews, your former neighbors and friends."

"That is very perceptive of you, Tauriel. I am a Dark Elf, so I am of Durin's Folk, by a little of my blood. But I lived among these Dwarves, often, until your father decided to keep me prisoner here, for 50 years. And i regard Fili and Kili as my nephews. i may not have seen them for fifty yaers, but you may recall that I spent a lot of time with Thorin, when they were young boys. While I have your ear, I want to tell you something about my youngest nephew. Kili has a poet's soul, and a warrior's heart, like his father. he was like taht even as a child. Reckless, impulsive and emotional. The people he loves, he loves very deeply, and he holds their lives to be as important as his own. He's certainly not the ind of lad who looks before he leaps. So you must look. Kili's not like his brother, or even his Uncle Thorin, he's not a young man for casual affairs. I was present for his first disastrous love affair. He fell hard, and he fell quickly, and deeply. Just like Thorin. But the girl he fell for was not like me. They were both so young, only in their twenties, so you cannot really fault her for being overwhelmed by Kili, but when she dropped him, he was devastated. And he did not look at her with the eyes he looks at you, Tauriel. So, be careful. If you don't love Kili, then only befriend him. Because his heart doesn't break, it shatters."

Tauriel blushed, deeply.

"Is it so obvious?"

"It is to me. I remember when I was your age, and I met Thorin. Kili looks so like him, at that age. And before life dealt him so many cruel blows, Thorin was as chivalrous and romantic as his nephew. He is still as steadfast and as ardent. Thorin loves me no less than he did when he was a mad, impetous boy. And I can truly say that I love him no less, indded, I love my husband more, now than I did when I was young and silly. I know just how you feel. But, do not imagine that because Kili has fine manners that he doesn't have hot blood. His Uncle is almost two hundred, and at an age when most Dwarves would begin to grow grey and fat and wistful, Thorin remains a raging bull. You and Kili could get yourselves in a lot of trouble, with you having all night, every night, to walk these hallways. Kili's not thinking. You should be. Look, Tauriel, before you leap into his arms. I didn't, before I jumped into Thorin's. And I can't say I'm sorry for it, but I have paid for it. And your price might be greater. You are not the king's sister. Nor are you a completely free woman. Before you go any further, think about the price that you will have to pay for love, and if it will be worth it."

* * *

Thalin, son of Thorin, knew what was coming.

He ducked, and so did Morgana and Dragonkiller and Legolas.

The plate sailed harmlessly over Estel's head, and hit the lad's father, King Thranduil, right in the side of the head.

Somehow, Tharnduil was always the only one who didn't know when Anorloth was going to throw something at him.

Like he had convinced himself, since the last time that she had done it, that never again would she be so impertinent.

Tiny Anorloth had thrown the plate with a great amount of force, great enough that it shattered when in met the Elvenking's skull.

That didn't usually happen, and Legolas and Thalin both threw their arms over Estel, to keep him from being hit with flying pieces of plate.

Meanwhile, King Thranduil almost fell right out of his chair.

"Great Mother Danu! Am I bleeding?" the King asked the Queen.

She daubed at the spot where the plate hit him, with her napkin.

"Just a little."

"A little is far too much! Anorloth, you harridan! You had might as well be a fishwife, a Common Dwarrow fishwife!" Thranduil shouted.

"Wait a minute! Flag of truce! Gay, can you remove Estel from the line of fire?"

"Certainly, Ari."

Queen Gaheriel got up and ushered her youngest nephew, Estel, away from the side of the table he was sitting on, and over to his mother, Aearonhen, at her request.

"Why are Daddy and Aunt Anorloth fighting, now?" Estel asked.

"Because your father has put Auntie's husband in jail." Princess Aearonhen replied.

"Why?"

"Because he and his friends were wounded and starving and lost in Daddy's kingdom on their way to go and kill a dragon."

"That doesn't sound right. Why would Daddy punish them, for being lost and wounded and starving?"

"Because they are Dwarves."

"But cousin Thalin's a Dwarf!"

"I know. Sometimes Daddy doesn't make any sense to Mummy, either." Ari replied to her son.

"Wisdom from the mouth of babes, husband." The Queen commented.

"Thalin! Do something about your mother!"

The burly, ginger-haired Dark Elf looked up from his plate with a nod and a wink to his Uncle.

Usually, he'd put a stop to these fights.

"Not this time. Uncle. Do something about my father." Thalin replied.

He calmly carried on with his breakfast as an entire place setting, one item after another, flew past him, and smashed into his Uncle Thranduil.

Over the years, Anorloth's aim had gotten very good.

"Coward! Ponce! You disgrace our father's memory! He died, fighting , and he bore to his grave, proudly, the scars of his triumphs over dragons, orcs, and the Enemy, himself! as does your son, Dragonkiller! He is not ashamed that he is a man, and a warrior; he dose not try to make himself look as pretty as a woman! Our father would die a second time at this latest foul act of cowardice, in a series of foul acts of petty vengeance and cowardice that his once-valiant son has committed! You are not my brother! I will show you who my brother is!"

Anorloth pointed an accusing finger at her brother, and catching him completely off guard, undid the spell over his ugly, wretched scars.

"That is my brother! That is the face of my brother the warrior, my brother the King, my brother the terror of the orc hordes, the bane of dragons! I do not know the stranger who wastes Mother Danu's blessings on spells of vanity, who cowers under the blankets of his wife and her sisters for fear of a dragon, who treats a great King, of a house with whom ours had been allied since the First Age, as if he was a common criminal!"

Thranduil covered the scarred side of face with his hand.

"Queen of all bitches, what have you done to my face?" he screamed, turning his face towards her.

"You will not be able to work your spell for some time! Your mother may not have been mine, but do not forget that my mother had the blood of the Hidden Folk, whom Morgana was also the mother of!"

"I will never let him go, you wicked fairy bitch! Never! Your beloved Thorin will rot in my jail until there is nothing left of him but his bones! You may whore yourself for him as much as you like, but he will never leave my jail alive!"

"Thranduil! Watch your language in front of Estel!" Princess Ari rebuked him.

"Father, please! The little ones! And we are at the breakfast table, with a guest! Would you have him think that we are no better than a bunch of tinkers or fishwives? Come along, Estel. I have lost my appetite, and today is a fine day for you to practice with your bow."

Having had his say, Legolas threw down his napkin, and took charge of his youngest brother.

Anorloth waited until Legolas and his youngest half-brother were gone, to deliver her next insult.

"At least if I was to visit my husband, in the evenings, I would never get a black eye for my troubles." Anorloth finished.

Having vexed her brother into taking a fit, and making a fool of himself, Anorloth sat down, again.

"After the night you've had, I'm surprised you can sit, sister. I'm sure you can't sit with your knees together, at any rate!"

"You would know, wouldn't you?"

"Throw me a roll, won't you, Thalin?" Fili interrupted.

"Catch!"

Thalin threw his cousin Fili a roll.

Morgana insisted on bringing him to the breakfast table, before she returned him to the jailhouse.

"Fili! Thalin! Stop that! We pass the rolls, Fili. We do not throw food. I know that in your Uncle's absence that you and Kili eat like hogs at a trough, but you will use the manners that your mother and your Uncle took pains to teach you at my brother's and my table! Have i made myself clear?"

"Sorry, Mum. Yes, Mum."

"Yes, Aunt Ani. Sorry, Aunt Ani. Thalin, would you pass the butter, please?"

"Certainly."

Fili was even careful to use the butter-knife to remove the butter, put the buter on his plate and then use his butter-knife to cut open his roll.

"You know, for what it's worth, I always thought that story was wargshite. The one about you, Uz-Thranduil, your majesty, and my uncle. I don't care how much absinthe he had, or how dear of friends the two of you were. I mean, Ori and Gimli are two of my best friends in the world, and it's never made us develop an eye for each other. And if I told you we had never been drunk together, that would be a vicious lie. And the gods only know a man can be close to another man, without going queer for each other! I mean, there's no one I'm closer to in the world than my brother. I haven't been apart from him for more than two or three weeks in his whole life. At home we sleep in the same bedroom, in different beds. And I've been dead drunk and passed out in bed next to my brother, and we've slept in the same bed while traveling because Uncle's too cheap to hire two rooms, and Kili and I we never decided to carry on the family tradition of my father and my Uncle. My point is, you either fancy a man, here and there, or you fancy men, exclusively, or you don't. You don't just go all queer for your best mate, all the sudden, this one time, do you? I mean, all that wargshite about brave men loving each other too well is something they put in dirty books for women. Women like to think about two strong masculine men who otherwise love women being tempted to a moment of buggery. Just a moment. So they can imagine themselves being in there, somewhere. You know. The same way we men like to think about two women together. Only if they are beautiful, and only if we are invited." Fili casually opined.

As he buttered his roll.

"I agree with Fili, Uncle. And every woman in Middle Earth, man, Elf, Dwarf or Hobbit, who can read a cheap broadside either dreams of being one of your concubines or that my father will end up one cold night in his travels on their doorstep. And if women think like we do, at all…" Thalin added.

Anorloth interrupted him.

"Fili, if your mother and your Uncle were here, you would not be talking like this at table! And Thalin, don't you encourage him! You really are your father's son, Fili, do you know that?" Anorloth insisted.

"I'm only trying to defend my Uncle! I've seen him in the midst of some ...business, walking into the wrong room, or, on the road, before he's thrown his boot at my head and told me to turn and face the wall, and none of that business has ever involved a man. And here I am, at your brother's table, with all his wives and all his children, and now that I have met him, I just don't see his Majesty the Elvenking jumping onto the other side of the blanket, either." Fili replied.

"He's only being honest, sister. Boys often are!" Thranduil interjected.

Fili finished his roll and bowed his head.

"Thank you, Uz-Thranduil, Your Majesty." He said.

"Fili, you don't seem at all disturbed by our little circus." Morgana told him.

"What family doesn't fight at table? If you fight at a table, you Elves aren't as inhuman as I was led to believe you were. Even Hobbits fight at table. Well, maybe not usually."

"What do you know of Halflings, son of Vargbrand?" King Thranduil sniped.

"Much, Uz-Thrandiul, Your Majesty. I have three children with Marigold Brandybuck, of the Clan Took. Ivy, Holly, and Thrain. Mari and her father both think I'm too footloose for marriage, but I've spent three days a week at Brandy Hall since Ivy was born, seven years ago. Well, until now. And though I do not mean to malign your largesse, I would rather I was at Brandy Hall, again, than here."

"So, you admit it freely. Good."

"You knew?"

"I know everything about the Heirs of Durin. I am not the fool my sister thinks I am. Your brother is yet a boy, and you are little more than one, with three small children. Your Uncle should not have brought you into peril!"

"He had his doubts about taking us. But Kili and I refused to stay behind."

"Your honor will be the death of you, my lad."

"Well, my brother seems to think these are the last days of his life. But I have no intention of dying. Or letting him die, for that matter. After all, I am the Heir. It's my responsibility not to die, and to protect my brother."

Fili folded his napkin, got up, and bowed deeply at the waist to the Elvenking, to Anorloth, and to the Queen and her sisters.

"Thank you very much, for having me at your table, Your Majesties. I'm ready to go back to jail now, Captain Tauriel." He said.

Politely.

Bowing his head to his jailer.

Fili let Tauriel put manacles on his wrists, and bowed again, on his way out.

"See what nice manners my nephew has? As if he were a Prince, taught etiquette and manners by a King. Oh, I forgot, he is a Prince! Not a common bloody criminal."Anorloth protested.

He heaved a great sigh.

"Yes, well, he and Thalin only threw one roll, and they only had their elbows, not their feet on the table! I wish the lad had been more mannerly last night, so he had not awakened me in the wee hours!"

"That was my fault, Father." Morgana volunteered.

"Don't take all the blame on yourself, my girl! Alright, sister, I will make you a bargain. If Thorin can be as mannerly and witty as his sister son, then he need not spend the night locked up. And he may have his meals at my table. Then, when he acts like an oaf of a Dwarrow blacksmith, he will be the villain of the piece and not me!" Thranduil pronounced.

* * *

That evening, Captain Tauriel escorted Thorin Oakenshield from his jailhouse quarters, and he was certainly dressed for dinner.

Anorloth had cleaned all of his fine clothes, and polished his hair ornaments and buckles and braces until the mithril shone like sunlight.

Thorin refused to be manacled, but he had given Thranduil his word as an Heir of Durin that while he was at the King's table or in his household he would make no attempts at escape.

Tauriel had never seen any man, not even her King, carry himself with such an air of majesty as Thorin did.

When he entered the King's dining hall, he bowed at the waist to the Queen and her sisters, all of whom got up and curtsied.

He bowed his head to King Thranduil and thanked him for the invitation to his table, and Thranduil was forced to bow his head in return, and be gracious.

Anorloth usually sat in the chair at the head of the table opposite her brother, but she vacated it for her husband, the Lord of New Belegost, as he was of higher rank than her.

"I have heard from my wife, Thranduil, that my nephew decided that he would talk about matters better suited for the barracks at your table, this morning. I apologize for his behavior. He may have his beard, but he is yet a boy, and he has an idealized view of his wicked father that he has it in his fool lad's head to follow. He won't do it again. And if he dares to, he won't be returning to your table."

Thranduil was furious that Thorin took the initial wind out of his sails.

"I accept the Prince's apology." He replied.

Politely, but tersely.

Thorin was on his best behavior, and his kingly air of majesty and his position at table influenced the servants to treat him as they did their king and queen, serving him after the royal couple and before his "wife", Anorloth.

Tauriel could not believe the transformation.

It was as if this was a different man than the one Tauriel had met the night before.

Thorin even chastised his grown son, for putting his elbows on the table.

Tauriel knew her King well enough to know he seethed at Thorin's impeccable manners; his plan had backfired on him, and unless he did something to make himself look less kingly than Thorin Oakenshield, to get his goat, there was nothing he could do in the situation.

The worst of it was yet to come.

"Anorloth, as your lord and husband, I would ask you to remove your spell from your brother. He has a young son, and I cannot help but notice that the child cringes every time he looks at his father. Those scars must be frightening for the little lad to look upon. Would you have your nephew frightened of his own father, because you bear him ill will?"

Thranduil clutched his fork so hard he bent it between his fingers.

"As you wish, my lord and husband. For Estel's sake." Anorloth agreed.

The Elvenking was then obliged to thank both his sister, and Thorin Oakenshield.

Following the meal, the Queen tried to disrupt the tension, by asking her servants to bring Thalin's golden harp to the dining hall.

"It has been so long, Thorin, almost two hundred years, since we have heard you play. Thalin plays so well, but he has often claimed to me that he is not your equal. Before you and Anorloth retire, perhaps you could play for us."

Tauril was frankly dumbfounded by Thorin's skill as a musician.

He had a very strong voice, too, and very deep.

He sang for them "_The Ballad of Azanulbizar_", which had been written by his brother-by-law, Lothinwaen.

In Westron, and Sindarin.

Dagnir, who had been present at that battle, sang the last few verses with him, and he was actually moved to tears.

"Forgive me, Prince Amlugndagnir, if I have brought you grief, to recall that bloody day." Thorin apologized.

"My Lord Thorin, who had more grief on that day than you? It is for you, and for your people, my allies, that I weep. And for the breaking of the alliance between us."

Tauriel could hardly believe that Dagnir had blurted such a thing out.

At dinner, no less!

King Thranduil looked eager, as if he thought he might have Thorin, now.

But Thorin only drew himself up into what Kili had called "the greatest height of his kingly majesty", and he might well have been seven feet tall, as he sadly gave a regal little nod.

"All is not broken between our peoples. Is my beloved wife not an Elf? And you and my only son, Thalin, you are of the same blood. Just as I would never break with my wife or my son, so I would not break with you, Dragonkiller. For when Dwarrows have called, you have never failed to answer. Few among Elves or Men have honored the old alliances between our races. You honor to the ancient alliances established by my forefathers and by your grandfather, does your mother and your father proud." Thorin replied.

_Flawless.  
Absolutely flawless_, Tauriel thought.

"Thank you, King Under the Mountain. I have tried to instill in my son the same sense of duty and honor that his grandfather, a yeoman warrior of Numenorian stock, possessed. I am glad to see that my teachings took." Princess Aaronhen replied.

Thranduil swallowed a scowl.

"I have always been proud of Amlugndagnir. He is a true prince. I find I must thank you for recognizing that." King Thranduil curtly replied to Thorin.

Who bowed his head.

With great majesty.

Thorin would not be prevailed upon to play another song, saying that he was yet tired from his ordeal in the forest, and wished to retire.

Bowing to his hosts, once more, Thorin took Anorloth's hand, and with one more bow of his head, he and his wife retired.

It was a complete victory for Thorin Oakenshield, and King Thranduil was livid.

Tauriel could not help but think that her King deserved what he got, for he had brought it upon himself.

* * *

Though it was Dagnir's night to guard the prisoners, Tauriel still could not sleep.

She was awake when Dagnir came to bring Prince Fili from the jailhouse, indeed, she had never been to bed; she sat by the Great Hearth in the Dining Hall until two or three in the morning.

Then, though it was against her better judgment to do so, she went to see Kili.

He was asleep; she could see the heaviness of sleep in his eyes as he opened the oak door and came to the bars.

He was wearing a silver-grey linen nightshirt; the kind that ordinary Elves wore; Tauriel didn't know who provided it to him.

It fit him quite well; as if it had been made for him; it was neither too long or too small, if just a little baggy at the shoulders.

"Where did you get that?" she asked.

"My Aunt gave it to me. It was one of my Uncle's, that she made for him. I don't quite fit into it, yet, but give me a few years."

"Oh. Well, I wanted to tell you about how the dinner went, tonight." Tauriel said.

She knew she was grasping at straws, but Kili didn't seem to notice.

"Fili! Tauriel's going to tell us about how dinner went, tonight."

"I can hear her from my bed, Kili. I have to rest. Morgana will be here, soon."

"Do Dwarrows have the saying, hoist by his own petard?" Tauriel asked.

"I never heard that one." Kili replied.

"It means the same as buried in his own mineshaft." Fili explained.

"However you say it, King Thranduil expected that your uncle would act like, well, like a common Dwarrow blacksmith, but he was, instead, the very model of majesty and dignity. After dinner, he even played the harp for us."

"If I had been there, I could have played my fiddle. That is if my fiddle isn't lying in a thousand pieces on the floor of Mirkwood forest." Kili replied.

"There is a violin, in a fine case, amongst that which we confiscated from your company. After I have checked the case for weapons, I would be glad to return your violin to you, Kili."

"Really? I would greatly appreciate that! If I had my fiddle, I could pass the time doing something. Shut up, Fili!"

"I said nothing, little brother!"

"You were about to."

Kili was going to say something else, but they were interrupted by Morgana's arrival.

No sooner did she unlock the door than did Fili jump up out of bed.

He was out the door of the cell and up the stairs like the wind, with Morgana not far behind.

"Why the hurry? Do they imagine that my King is about to outlaw their favourite pursuit, this night? I do not know how he would fill the time it left in his busy schedule!" Tauriel joked.

Kili chuckled.

Tauriel laughed, too.

"Did you stay up so late just to tell me, about dinner?"

"No. Prince Kili, after today, I must say, there are things that trouble me. Your Uncle is no friend to Elves. But his son is an Elf. His wife is an Elf. And he treats Dragonkiller as if he were one of his own lieutenants."

"Well, for one thing, my Aunt is a Dark Elf. So is my cousin Thalin. And Dagnir is part Numenorian. Also, he lived among out people for almost a hundred years, before I was born."

"I know. But how do you know him well enough to call him Dagnir?"

"When Thalin comes to visit, Dagnir comes with him, sometimes. Especially when I was little, and my Aunt came, too."

"That is even more disturbing!"

"Why?"

"Because you are locked up like a common criminal!"

Kili shrugged.

The warmth suddenly left his wide brown eyes, and he looked infinitely sad.

"That doesn't bother me so much. After what I have been through since I left the Blue Mountains, I am glad, in these last weeks of my life to have food, and rest, a roof over my head, a warm bed, and my brother's company. Without peril, or hunger."

Tauriel felt a cold hand grabbing at her guts, turning them in her belly.

It was the icy grip of mortality, death itself.

"Why do you expect to live no longer than a few weeks?"

"There are no other bowmen in this company, Tauriel. Amongst Dwarves, there are very few bowmen, at all. And I am a very young man, not even 80. My brother is the heir to the Lonely Mountain. Thalin is the heir to New Belegost. Me? I am the heir to dragon's fire. I have been bred, since I was a boy, as far back as I can recall, to kill Smaug. Or die trying. To get close up enough on a dragon to kill him with an arrow, I imagine that I will die either way." Kili replied.

He did not sound sad, or sorry.

He was calm, and resolved.

"Has your Uncle told you this for many years, that you are so resolved?"

"I never thought of it until this quest. When I first came to realize my purpose, I was scared. And angry. But I understand, now, that this purpose is as important as my brother's. And my cousin's. I'm not looking forward to it, by any means. But I am resigned to my fate. To my duty. To my destiny."

"But you are like a son to Thorin Oakenshield, are you not?"

"My Uncle is the King Under the Mountain. My brother and Thalin are his heirs. I am the dragonslayer. That is how it is."

Tauriel saw the shadow of pain flit across Kili's face.

"What will you do, though, if you survive? My King has killed many dragons, and he lives. And dragon's fire is just as fatal to Elves as it is to Dwarves or Men. Dagnir had killed a few, and he lives. And my King did his dragon killing with a sword. He had to get much closer to his prey than you will have to, with an arrow. Your mother, she expects you to return to her. Have you no hope for your future, Kili?"

Her words cracked the young prince's steely resolve, and he rapidly dissolved into tears, and put his face in his hands.

"What have ye said to the lad, she-Elf, that I can hear our Kili weeping from all the way up here!"

Insisted Dwalin.

"It's not her fault, brother! And it is not the first time. I have heard him cry! Be still! maybe the girl can help." Balin rebuked his brother.

"Don't tell them what I said, Tauriel. Please, don't tell anyone." Kili asked her.

"I won't, Kili." Tauriel told him.

Even though she was not sure if she should tell, or not.

She remembered what Anorloth said about looking before she leapt.

And forgot it, at the same time.

Tauriel reached her hand through the bars, lifted Kili's face from his hands, and dried his tears with her sleeve.

"I'll give you something to hope for, Kili. You may hope for us. For you, and I. We are both archers. Hunters. When all this is over, and your Uncle and my King have mended fences, it will be as it once was, between my people and yours. Even if Dwarves and Elves, generally are at odds, between Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain, we shall not be. And you and I, we shall be, not jailer and prisoner, but colleagues. Friends. We'll go hunting, together. For days. Weeks, even. We'll make camp under the stars, and tan hides and work pelts, and make arrows. And dance around the campfire, and drink too much wine, and tell bad jokes and lie to each other about the biggest animal we ever killed. With just a dagger. And since you're not an heir, and I'm not a princess, no one will come looking for us, or worry about where we've got to. We'll come and go as we please, Kili, and, we'll do what we like."

Kili put his hand on top of hers, and moved it, a little, so that he could kiss her palm.

"Is that what you would like, Kili?" she nearly whispered.

"I would like to kiss you, Tauriel, so that your whole body would tremble, the way your palm trembles against my cheek." Kili admitted.

"If we were alone in the wood, who would know?" Tauriel replied.

Bravely.

"That is something to hope for, Tauriel. And not just because you might let me kiss you. It has been quite some time since I had anything to hope for. Thank you."

Impulsively, she leaned her face against the bars, and quickly kissed Kili's whiskery cheek.

"I will hope for it, too, Kili. But still, I doubt that your Uncle has brought you up from when you were a tiny child, just to watch you die. Try to let that give you hope, too."

* * *

Kili's words disturbed Tauriel.

She eventually went to the second tier, and quietly told the wise old Dwarf, Balin, all that Kili had said.

"Then he has noticed! The lad is his father's son; he has great sensitivity to the emotion in others. Fili has either not noticed or shrugged it off. But Kili sees it."

"What?"

"It's not my part to tell you, Captain, nor is it your part to know. Thank you for telling me, though. I will see to the problem."

* * *

Tauriel did not have the King's permission to let Balin meet with his king, but she allowed it, anyway, first thing in the morning when he returned to the jailhouse, for twenty minutes, only, keeping vigil outside the empty cell where she locked both of them.

"What, Balin? News from our burglar?" Thorin quietly asked.

In Khuzdul, of course.

"News of your youngest sister son, Thorin. And not good news. Kili no longer feels that he has the love of the only father he has ever known. He has come to think that you saved him, and have raised him, only so that he might kill Smaug, and that it is his duty to die trying." Balin replied, in kind.

"What? How….why…."

Thorin grasped for words.

"In your changed nature, Thorin! The closer you come to your great-grandfather's kingdom, the more like him you become! The dragon-sickness has you, already! The chill that we all now feel in your concern for our welfare is icy and keen to your young nephew!"He confided in his jailer, She said that she found it . difficult for to break his steely resolve that it was his duty, his purpose, his destiny to be dragon-fodder. But when she did, he wept bitterly. Indeed, he was inconsolable, all night, and wept so bitterly that there was not a Dwarf in this jailhouse who did not hear him, or who would not have wished to comfort him. Kili cried all night, until his brother returned in the wee hours of the morning, and I imagine that Fili was able to comfort the poor lad enough that he could sleep, But we can do liitle for Kili. He has lost two fathers, in one young lifetime. He cannot be consoled by anyone but the Dwarf who took both his fathers from him." Balin replied.

"Do you rebuke me for taking him from the household of a monster?"

"No."

"Balin, surely you know that whether I am mad or sane, I march on Erebor not for myself, but for him and Fili, for their sakes, not my own! And to think that my little lad, my youngest, who has the kindest heart, that he imagines I do not love him? Mahal's shorter and curlier beard, sometimes, I only know that I still have a heart when it is breaking! " Thorin protested.

"I know, laddie. It's Kili who does not. You ought to talk to him." Balin suggested.

"I will. And you say he confided in his jailer? The little ginger she-Elf, who is only an inch or so taller than Kili and I are?"

"That is another problem."

"It is! She is a full-blooded Elf! Not to mention I do not want to see Kili make the same mistakes, and suffer the way i have."

"Will you try to discourage him?"

"You are old Balin, but not that old! The girl's a fine, pretty little warrior woman. If you were a boy, and you loved that girl, could you be discouraged?"

Balin chuckled.

"I would not be."

"Then I will put him wise, for that is all I can do, about his jailhouse romance. Otherwise, I will put an end to this madness!"

"Kili's, or yours, laddie."

"Both, I would hope."

* * *

Tauriel committed another small act of treason that night, taking Thorin down the secret stair, and letting him into his nephew's cell.

What they had to say to each other was deeply personal, and so she went far from them, and did not listen.

* * *

Before the dwindling fires of the Elvenking's Great Hearth, Bilbo Baggins sat with Fili, the latter dressed only in his loincloth, both smoking a pipe.

They were speaking in generalities, while Bilbo used his poor Iglishmêk to talk to Fili about the escape.

And then the young Dwarf surprised Bilbo, speaking aloud in Westron.

Greatly.

"It's almost time for the harvest festival, in the Buckland. Have you been to it, Bilbo?"

"I usually attend the festival in the Shire. But I do have kin in Buckland, so I have. Been to it. Not for years, though."

"I wish I could snap my fingers, right now, and be in Brandy Hall. Can you keep a secret, Bilbo?"

"What kind of secret?"

"One that everyone knows, but no one talks about."

"That is the hardest kind to keep. But I shall try."

"You have a cousin, Marigold. Your Aunt Mirabella's daughter."

"Certainly I have a cousin Marigold. She's actually a little notorious. She has three children. Two daughters and a son. Three years apart. Ivy is seven, Holly is four, and the little boy, I missed the christening, but he ought to be almost two years old, now. Anyway, they all live, quite happily in Brandy Hall, with the Master of Buckland, but Mari, well, she isn't married. Her, well, the children's father, he supports his children, and Mari says he visits, three days a week, every week that he is not travelling, which he doesn't do much of, but she won't marry him. She says she loves him but-"

"—but he's a bit of a scoundrel. He could never settle down with one woman. Oh he loves her, she knows that. And he's a fine father, loves his children, too. But he couldn't marry her. He wouldn't be allowed. Well, just at this moment, he doesn't give a fiddler's fuck. If he had it to do over again, he would have married her before he left the Shire. If he had three wishes, he'd use them all to see his little Hobbit lass, and his daughters, and his son, again. To be at the fair in Buckland, and eat a turkey leg, with one daughter sitting on each knee, watching his Mari dancing with all those long velvet ribbons in her hair."

Bilbo didn't know what to say.

"She's probably right about me not being able to have only one woman. But I could settle down, alright. And I promise you, Bilbo, if we both live through this, I'm escorting you back to the Shire. And I'm going to marry Mari, and bring her home with me. And if Uncle Thorin doesn't fancy having Thrain, son of Fili, son of Vargbrand in his sucession, well, he'll have to get used to it."

Fili moved a stone at the corner of the hearth and got a letter out from under it.

"Find the courier for me, Bilbo. Put this in his bag. I want Mari to know."

Bilbo wasn't sure what to say.

Finally he thought of something.

"Well, I should like to host your wedding reception. At Bag End."

Fili grinned at him.

"Thank you, Bilbo. I'll be on me best behavior. But I can't say the same thing for my children. They're wild as Rhosgobel rabbits. Well, I'd better go back to bed. I only have so long, and after I leave here, I doubt I'll lay my hands on a woman, again, before I'm ashes and char. I really am fond of Morgana. I think if Mari asked me to, I could give up every other woman in the world, except for Morgana the Witch. I think I'll tell her that. Before I lose me nerve. Keep your eye on those barrels, Bilbo."

"There are five empty, now. And I almost have all of your weapons, that is, all the Company's weapons, hidden in the sturdiest barrel. Their festival lasts the fortnight. I think we'll just make it."

"For all our sakes, I hope you're right, Bilbo."

* * *

Thorin knew the sound of Kili weeping.

He just hadn't heard it for a very long time.

He was crying like he had when he was just a little boy.

"Fili? Are you back, already? I'm so miserable."

The youngest of his sister sons sounded so miserable that Thorin pushed Kili's bed curtains open, sat down on his bed, and held the sobbing boy against his chest as he had when Kili was a tiny child.

It tore at Thorin's heart, the harsh sound of the young man's tears.

They were more heartbreaking than those of a child, because Kili was a young man, fearless, reckless, and strong.

"Listen to me, my sister son. I have not spent seventy –three years raising you, as if you were my own boy, to fling you into the wurm's mouth! You cannot know how precious your life is to me, Kili. You are my youngest, and it is true, a man has a special feeling for his youngest child. I had you trained as an archer because your father was a fine young man, and a fine bowman. He deserved far better from life that what he got. I saved you from that fate, Kili. And I dinna bloody teach you to shoot so that you could kill the dragon! At least not the way you think. There is a windlass in Laketown; that is as close as I would have you shoot; and if there is any other man who could, then let him risk his life. Not my son. It's not all for the gold that I desire the Mountain. Or even for revenge. Though the desire for both eats at my guts, and makes me a man I hate to see in my mirror. I desire my grandfather's throne and his kingdom for my people. And for my family. For my wife and my son, and for you and Fili. I am an old man; even if I live to be 300, or 350 as my grandfather's brothers did, I have not much life left to be King Under the Mountain. But you are at the very start of your life, Kili. There is so much you might have, and so much you might do. It is for you, my youngest, who will have no Lordship or Kingship that I undertake this quest, most of all. For who knows who and what you might be as a man. As your broken father never could be. I would die, myself, of grief, if I lost you, lad. You have all that is best in the Line of Durin, and none of what is worst. If I was to waste your life, then if Mahal did not cast me into the deepest most arid and frozen pit of Nifleheim, I would throw myself to it! I swear to you, Kili, no matter what, in my madness I may do or say, that is the truth!"

Thorin was almost crying, by the time he was done speaking.

He tried to hide it, by acting stern and angry.

"Now, I want those foolish ideas that I raised you as dragon fodder gone from your head! Gone, boy! I forbid you to even think them!"

"They are gone, now, Uncle. Now that I am talking to you, again, and you have explained yourself. But since we started this quest, you have not been yourself, sometimes. It is as if I didn't know you, at all"

"As my grandfather was not himself, when I was a lad. But no one seemed to notice, but me. He and I had this conversation, a long time ago. Your great-grandfather asked me to help him, to tell him when the sickness was making him into a man I did not recognize. Can you do the same thing for me, Kili lad?"

"You won't be angry? Or insulted."

"I'll be both. But I want you to tell me, anyway. That is the mistake I made with grandfather. I did not tell him loudly enough. Or often enough."

"Then you have my word that I will. After all, it's not every day that I get your permission to tell you that you're wrong."

Kili sniffed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

"Good. Then but one foolish thing remains. One I have no place to speak of, unless I was the biggest fookin' hypocrite in Middle Earth. I have to warn you, about Captain Tauriel. She may not be Thranduil's sister, but she still belongs to him. And he is a jealous man with every woman of his household. He's not like that Elrond, all stately and stable and sane. His mother was Morgan le Fay, the Queen of all the Witches, Mother of the Silvani and Hidden Folk, alike, and his grandmother was Danu, Goddess of the Wood and the Wild! Some of that crown on his head is a crown, and some of it is his own living antlers! Don't get ideas about Thranduil's being noble, he's got too much of the wildness of the wood and the hunt in him for that. He's a snake in human form; like Jormungrandr, himself! If the girl will have you, take her. And I am not talking about your lying with her. Whether you've had her, or not, after we retake the Mountain, come back here, in the middle of the night, in secret, even if you must borrow Bilbo's ring, and tell her that if she wants you, that she's to come away from here with you. Then, before the sun rises, marry her, and take her, so that the marriage cannot be undone! Even if you have to be married in Laketown, by a cleric or a magistrate of men! As long as it is legal and binding, and she is your wife, of whom the laws say Thranduil has no more dominion over! And when that's done, we'll smuggle you both back to New Belegost, and you can be married under our own laws. And you may come back to Erebor with your wife when I send for you. Thranduil will never just let you have her. If you want her, you'll have to steal her, and outsmart him. Don't make the same mistakes I did, with your Aunt."

"But Uncle, the scandal!"

"Scandal! What fookin' scandal? You're my reckless youngest sister son, with no kingdom of your own, the son of a great, brave, mad warrior-poet! And the ginger she-Elf is a minor ward of the Elvenking's court; she's no lady or princess. If you want scandal, Kili lad, you'll have it when your brother marries Marigold Brandybuck, with all of their children in attendance! And if Fili does not agree to of his own free will, then before Durin's Day comes again, he will do it, anyway!"

"You don't mind your heirs having Hobbit blood?"

"I don't mind my heirs having Tookish blood. Why do you think I let Bilbo be our burglar? Because Gandalf said so? I don't care how much he raised hsi voice and does wizard tricks. I was convinced once I found out that Bilbo is a Took. I fought at their side when the goblins invaded our lands, and I know Tooks. When your back is against the wall, and before you lies certain death, better a Took at your side than a trained cave troll with a catapult and a wagon full of balls of flaming wargshite. I am alive, today, and not a pile of wargshite under Azog's beast, myself, because I learned that lesson. Don't you forget it. Are you alright now, lad?"

"Much better."

"I'll get the jailer."

"Wait. Uncle, how do you woo an Elf?"

"Elves are no different than any other woman. They're all different, so you woo them all differently."

"How?"

"First you may forget everything Fili has ever told you about women."

"I know that. But still, I have no luck. Isn't there anything general about it?"

"Not much. But listen lad, never chase a woman. Let her chase you. And don't push yourself on her, either. When she wants you, she'll let you know. And whatever you do, don't ever talk to her about how big your cock is. Or just take it out and show it to her. You'll get a slap in the face and she'll never speak to you again. And you never tell a woman you love her if you don't. No matter what. And if you don't love her, you'd better not wait till after you've screwed her to tell her. That's how you make a mess of things with women. Lying to them. They can forgive a man anything, except when he deceives them. And they know when you're lying, women do. The trick is to figure out when they are."

"How do I know that?"

"No man knows that. That's the trouble."

Thorin stood up.

"And, most importantly, what did I tell you, when you were 15 years old?"

"Never spend yourself in a woman unless you want to have a child. And if you keep your sheath clean, it'll keep you clean."

"You didn't leave yours in Rivendell, with that tart of a harpist, did you?"

"No. I have it. Hope springs eternal."

"That's not all that springs eternal, in this family, Kili, lad! If only your brother had listened to me! I hope he has with Morgana. Or he'll be in need of more medicine than Oin knows!"

* * *

"Morgana, after I get married, would you be my mistress? You know. The way your mother is your father's mistress."

"Me? Your official concubine"

"That sounds too much like a slave. We Dwarves have more respect for women. Official mistress."

"You couldn't, Fili!"

"Why? Because you're an infamous slut?"

"You say that as if it was a complement."

"Coming from me, it is."

"You don't care that I am?"

"Of course I care. You know, I could give up every other woman, in favor of my wife, but you. I love that you're an infamous slut. If you still have to bring half the world to your bed, all I would ask is that you get a larger keyhole."

"You always have to get into the act."

"And?"

"And you end up throwing the other man out!"

"And you let me."

"That's because none of them hold a candle to you. You're more of an infamous slut than I am."

"Guilty as charged. Well?"

"I can't give up my position in my father's court."

"I wouldn't ask you to. It's not as if you are very far away."

"You know, Fili, no man has ever thought of making me his official anything. I've had your father. And your Uncle Thorin. And your other Uncle. Your father's brother. Both of them separately, and your father and his brother, together. I once got twenty men together, just to see what would happen if I had twenty men in one day. And you want me to be your mistress, and bear your beardy little bastards, who'll play with your Mari's children, in your Halls, under your Lonely Mountain?"

"Even better. Then I'm just keeping you in the family. How could you take on twenty men in one day, and not do it somewhere that I might have watched? And fit meself in, between shifts, of course."

"If you had been there, I would not have wanted or needed the other nineteen, my Great Beast. My burly, bonny, blond, blue-eyed Devil. You can buy me from my father, with Dwarf treasure, and make me your wicked witch, your Whore of Babylon."

"I already own you, Morgana. I bought and paid for you with my cock, a long time ago. You've got all the treasure I want to plunder between your legs, you infamous slut! You dirty, filthy, wanton whore!"

"…oooo...Fili…"

"…Morgana…"

* * *

"Captain Tauriel! Unlock my cell! In a hurry!" Fili shouted, breaking the silence of the night, and Tauriel's sleep as she dozed in the chair by the staircase.

Tauriel wondered why she had to, but no soonerr did she have his cell unlocked that Prince Fili came flying from the secret stair, stark bollock naked, ran past her and into his cell, slamming both doors.

"Lock it! Lock it! Fookin' lock it!" he insisted.

That was something to behold, even in anad of itself, but Prince Fili was so uncharacteristically flustered and unmanned that Tauriel just did what she was told.

For her King was hot on Fili's heels, thundering down the main steps and shouting.

"You young whelp of your wolf father, I told you that the next time I'd lay an axe handle across your back, and by all your savage gods I will break this piece of hickory across your shoulders, and beat you until you are black and blue and bloody!" he was shouting.

Tauriel turned away from the door, and she was suddenly face to face with her King.

He was brandishing a hickory axe-handle, and did not have his visage enchanted, nor was he wearing his crown, and in his anger, the stag-like antlers that his crown disguised were alive and engorged with the hot blood that throbbed from his temples.

Tauriel screamed, and Thranduil was somewhat taken aback.

"Am I that frightening? It's only me, girl!"

"I know, Your Majesty. But you startled me!"

"Where did that sawed-off little son of an orc go? That bonny little blond bastard my daughter is so damned fond of! He won't be so bonny when I get finished with him!"

"Prince Fili's in his room, my King. He's been there all night. His brother wasn't well, so Fili stayed with him." Tauriel lied.

"Oh no he did not! I had him by one of his blond braids!"

"Your Majesty, no insult to my good friend Morgana, but there are a lot of men in this palace with blond braids."

"And if I beat in the ribs of every one of them I suspect of lying with Morgana, then I will have a palace full of invalids, is that it?"

Thranduil threw the axe handle down, grabbed Tauriel by her arms, and put his face close to hers, scars and all.

"You had better not be lying to me for the sake of those Dwarves!" he sneered, angrily.

"I'm not, Your Majesty!" she lied.

The effect was terrifying.

But strangely exciting.

Her king was wearing only a pair of drawers, he was bare from the navel, up, and her body was close against his wiry bare chest, which, below his collarbone and between his nipples, had a little sprinkling of silver-blond down across it.

She began to feel whatever it was that pulled his wives to his side and kept them there.

Tauriel thought she must be losing her mind.

"Captain, your heart is pounding. And your breath is short. Are you that badly frightened? Or is it something other than fright that you feel?"

"It's just that when you stand so close to me, Your Majesty, you remind me so much of Legolas." Tauriel blurted out.

She immediately wished she had not spoken.

"Oh, Your Majesty, I'm so sorry!"

But the Elvenking smiled.

"You're not sorry, my poor little ginger ward. You're starving. I think it's about time I had words with my son."

He let her go, and went back up the stairs.

Tauriel went back over to her chair, and fell into it.

"Psst? Psst, hey, Tauriel? Are you alright?"

It was Fili, at the barred door of his cell.

Thankfully, he had wrapped a sheet around his waist.

"Do you have any of the wine left that Dagnir smuggles in to you?" Tauriel asked him.

Fili went and got the bottle, and Taurirl unsnapped her mug from her belt.

She held the mug to the bars, and her hand was shaking so badly that Fili had to steady it with his left hand while he poured the wine with his right.

"Thank you."

Tauriel took a long drink.

"I feel I am taking leave of my senses!" she told Kili's brother.

"I can put you right. And I won't tell your Legolas, or my brother. You let me out of here, and sit down and close your eyes, and I'll just kneel in front of your chair for a few minutes, and you'll be right as rain."

Tauriel blushed, and Fili winked.

"Do you think that's all that's bothering me?"

"No, but if the fire was out, you might be able to think a little clearer."

"I'm going to go and sit down, and pretend you did not just make me that offer." Tauriel told him.

"Well, I'll be here all night, in case you change your mind."

Tauriel took her mug and sat down.

She drank the rest of the wine and fell asleep in the chair.

* * *

"You didn't hurt the Dwarrow boy, did you?"

Thranduil got back into bed.

"He was back in his cell, locked up, and he either sweet-talked Tauriel into lying to me, or he had her fooled."

"That's not like her at all!"

"I know. But the poor girl is absolutely cock-struck. And not even with any man in particular. She has got to where she is not worried about who gives her the measure of his manhood, as long as someone does! Clearly, my son has been remiss in his duties. Damn the boy, I told him that he couldn't marry her! I didn't tell him to leave the poor girl lonely until she was seized with such madness that she would consider replacing him with a Dwarf! I will have to have a little talk with Legolas. Or he'll lose his mistress to a Dwarf. It's embarrassing enough, having my sister married to one. But to have my heir cuckolded by Thorin's very nephew? I'd never live it down. Tell me, Ari. Before I cover them up. Do these hideous scars do anything for you?"

"Not really. Dagnir has the kind of scars that make a man interesting to a woman. Yours are just…"

"Hideous?"

"They look like they're still painful."

"They aren't, anymore. I have pain in my blind eye, sometimes. But our daughter is an excellent healer."

"Why would you ask me such a thing? About your scars?"

"Well, in my anger, I grabbed Tauriel by the shoulders and got almost nose to nose with her and demanded she tell me the truth. And she absolutely melted into my arms. The poor girl put her arms around my neck and fell all over my chest; if I had a mind to, I could have dragged her into an empty cell and done what I liked with her, and she would have screamed the whole palace down on her head for joy. I know you think I'm just being a vain old bastard, but I don't even think she knew what she was doing. You should have seen the way she looked at me. And when I asked her what she was about, she blurted out that when I was so close to her, I reminded her of Legolas."

"Tauriel said that?"

"Yes! Clearly, the presence of all these men, especially that nephew of Thorin's, is turning young Tauriel's mind to thoughts of love. Or at least, filling her belly with hot lust. I'm going to have to talk to my heir. Is the boy blind?"

"You did forbid him when he asked you, about a hundred and fifty years ago, if he could marry Tauriel."

"Because she was far too young for marriage!"

"You were only 200, when you married us."

"I was a King. 200, or no! And I was not yet satisfied that Tauriel was a worthy wife for my son. I still think she's too young, and I have not made up my mind as to whether I would allow them to marry, or not. But, still, I told the boy he couldn't marry her! I didn't say he had to abandon her, completely. Or worse, to resign himself to chastity! Legolas is my heir, and his sons and daughters will be my heirs. When a man lets his manhood go for long enough, he might find he's not a man, anymore! I should have done something about it. About Tauriel. Better me than that Dwarf!"

"Such a selfless man is my husband."

"Don't mock me, woman. I'll make you wish you hadn't."

"I wish you would. After the little one comes, it will be two whole months before I have you back in my bed."

"You and all your sisters, you're raging nymphomaniacs, do you know that?"

"Certainly we do. Why do you think we married the son of Morgan le Fay, the Stag King, complete with horns?"

**_(Author's Note: I'm not ignorant of my Silmariliion, I know of Thranduil's history, and that he was 3000 when his son was 1900, not 2100. But I wanted to make him a little younger for the purposes of this story.)_**


	3. To Be Wise and Love Exceeds Men's Might

**Chapter Three: To Be Wise and Love Exceeds Men's Might**

"Stop a moment, Legolas."

Legolas was some 1,200 years older than his half-brother, Amlugndagnir, who was better known to the world by the jaunty Westron translation of his name, Dragonkiller.

And better known to his friends and family simply as Dagnir.

He was only 609, but Legolas' other brother was a child ten years old.

And though Greenleaf and Dagnir seemed little alike, still they were brothers, and close as two brothers might be.

Dragonkiller was an inch or two shorter than Legolas, but twice as wide in the shoulder and he was burly and black-haired, and as hirsuite in his black hair as a man was.

But when he was a young man, he was not so hairy, and he was so pretty that he was often mistaken for a girl.

As soon as he could, like his Numenorian grandfather, Dragonkiller grew a moustache and goatee.

When he was twenty he earned his name, and all his life wore a pair of boots made from the hide of his first dragon.

At 25 he went to war at his father's side, fighting orcs, but he got the branching scar on the left side of his face that looked like frost on a winter windowpane honoring the old alliance between Elves and Dwarves at Azanulbizar.

He didn't use magic to cover it; the scar, the goatee and moustache and his near-permanent jaunty smirking leer gave him a look of the fallen angel that drove women wild.

And women had always been one of Dragonkiller's favourite pastimes.

Indeed, he may have even preferred women to war.

Dragonkiller could never have enough of wine, women or war; he rode down the hillside and nearly into the mouth of Smaug even after his father called off the Elvin army, and commanded one of Vargbrand the Great Beast's legions in the War of Dwarves and Orcs.

But Dagnir similarly was known to ride with Rangers, and had gone to battle under the flag of Rohan, by whose savage gods of the Aesir he also swore.

There was always a war against orcs going on somewhere, or a lesser wurm than Smaug to be slain, a human witch or wizard trying to stir up trouble, or even unruly trolls.

You could be sure that after he had abided at home for more than a season or two, Dragonkiller would go and find any of these calamities, wherever they might be.

King Thranduil was, Legolas thought, unusually proud of his black-haired, burly, swaggering warrior son, and though by all rights Legolas, his father's heir, and Dagnir's polar opposite should have had nothing but disdain for his show-off, grandstanding, swashbuckling brother, he never considered same, for even a moment.

Legolas, unlike Thranduil, was not often the man he seemed to be.

His disgust with Dwarves was infamous, but from his very birth, Legolas had treated Thalin, son of Thorin as if he were a younger brother and not a cousin; he had never abandoned Anorloth and her son even when his father did, and did all in his power to help them, even when Anorloth and Thorin were living as man and wife in Laketown.

That was because Legolas did something his father never thought of, as a general rule.

He tried to understand the motivations of his kin, and his comrades, and even his enemies, before he judged them, even if he thought their actions were questionable.

Now, Legolas didn't completely understand his brother's desire to honor the old alliance between Men, Elves, and Dwarves, but he knew that Dagnir put great stock in it, and his honor was wrapped up in it.

Thalin felt the same way, but Legolas could fully understand his cousin's reasoning.

Legolas was in agreement with Thalin and Dagnir insofar as an alliance with men went, but he certainly didn't see any honor in being allied with Dwarves.

Although, especially around Thalin, he kept his prejudices to himself.

But, they were brothers; they ate and drank together, and hunted together, and had been to war together; hate could not have been further from their minds.

And when Thranduil told Legolas he would not marry Tauriel, because he was the heir, Legolas entrusted his love to his brother, Dagnir.

He preferred to think that guarding Tauriel's virtue was not a hands-on job, and often admonished Dagnir not to tell him otherwise, but it was only Dagnir's habit when he was falling-down drunk, so Legolas could forgive him.

Especially as Dagnir swore up and down that, in the main part, Tauriel was entirely virtuous, only having the occasional rare lapse, not more than five in a hundred and fifty

Legolas though, was far more inclined to seriousness than his brother, so when Dragonkiller approached him one morning with such a glum expression and serious tone, he was concerned.

"I am stopped, Dagnir. What troubles you? Have our prisoners made an attempt at escape? is Tauriel in danger?"

"No. But it regards Tauriel."

"Dagnir, you do not have to confess to me Tauriel's latest moment of weakness! My vow to my father to have no more to do with her has worn harder on her down the years that it has upon me. I would not begrudge her a little peace in your arms. But if you must tell me of it, again, in the detail you usually do, I may not be able to keep my vow!"

"You had better forget your vow, or lose your girl! It's not me, this time, Greenleaf. She's set her cap for the black-haired Prince of Erebor. The archer, Kili. Tauriel spends a lot of time, minding those prisoners. And my sister keeps Fili prisoner in her rooms, at night. Leaving our little Forester plenty of long, dark, quiet hours to while away with her Dwarf-swain."

"She would not! Not with a Dwarf?"

Dragonkiller laughed.

"You say that as if they were not human! By Thor, they are, as much as you and I! Kili and Fili are but different shoots from the same tree as we are, Greenleaf. I have lived among Dwarves, and I know the brothers well. You are lucky it's Kili she's set her cap for and not Fili, for Fili would have had her, two ways and maybe three, by the dawn of the first day in our jail and she would have been looking to him again by nightfall! But, as for Dwarves, as a race, they are shorter and stronger and hardier, but Dwarves are not foreign creatures, as if they were from the moon. Do you think our kinsman Thalin could exist, if Dwarves and Elves were so foreign to each other? Mother Danu, the whole race of Dark Elves come from the union of Dwarves and Elves! I, myself have had women of the Dwarrow race, and other than being a little short and their having fine, downy, scant beards on their chins, they are made no different than any other woman is. If Tauriel had come to see that men are men, despite the name of their race, I think she would do do it! Especially where Prince Kili courts her, and you ignore her. What woman would at least not be tempted?"

"Because Tauriel loves me!"

"And therefore she would never touch another man? Does she love me, Greenleaf? She's my Captain, and I would say she was my friend, but she doesn't love me, does she?"

"You are my brother! And you are an Elf, Dagnir!"

"And you are a man, Greenleaf! If you don't start using that third leg of yours to do something besides piss from and keep your hose from falling down, you're going to spend the next age or three with it in your hand, while Tauriel abides under the Mountain and under her Dwarf Prince husband!"

"But I swore to our father…"

"Well, go and swear at him, instead! That was a terrible promise, made to be broken. And if you love Tauriel, and you do not want to lose her, you should break it. And not tomorrow, or the day after or Tuesday next. Today, Greenleaf! Tomorrow may be too late."

"Brother, what makes you think that Tauriel is so close to surrendering her virtue to a Dwarf?"

"Tauriel's store of virtue is very nearly spent! This very morning, she dragged me, and by the buckle on my belt into the guardhouse, to pay me an unexpected service! And I barely had my breath again than was she falling all over my chest, her lips against my ear, whispering, fairly begging me to…well, to tip her the velvet. Well, considering the circumstances, I could hardly deny her. And it wasn't my name she called, when she had her fists in my hair, yanking it with all her might, at the height of her passion. And it wasn't yours, either, Greenleaf."

"Must you be so specific, Dagnir?"

"When you are in this much peril of losing the woman you love? Yes, I must!"

* * *

After Tauriel unlocked the cell door, that night, Kili held it open for her, because she had two large trays.

Of all her charges, Fili and Kili were the hungriest, if she did not bring them enough food to feed four Elves, at every meal, they would both of them come to the door of their cell and tell her how hungry they were, and how they had starved in the forest so that the older men could eat and keep their strength up.

They made what looked to her like huge muscles and complained how they were wasting away.

Tauriel pulled the cell door shut with her foot and put the trays on their table, but Fili continued to lay across his bed, unmoving.

"Aren't you hungry, Fili?"

"Starving. But I can't move. That witch, that whore, between her hungry mouth and her ravenous cunny, she's suckin' the life out of me!"

Tauriel pretended not to be shocked at his words.

"You could tell her when she comes for you tonight that you need a night off." Kili suggested.

"What? I would not deprive myself of one minute of filthy pleasure with my sweet lady Morgana, when I might be burnt to ashes by Durin's Day! Let me die instead the thick of battle, as a man was meant to, impaled on the sword of an orc, or impaling sweet Morgana, Queen of Whores, on my own!" Fili declared.

Kili laughed, and shook his head, and Fili got out of his bed, stretched, scratched the floor of his trim, hairy stomach, and then sat down to eat.

"Fili?"

"Yes, Kili?"

"Breeches."

"Where?"

"Not on your hairy, naked arse, that's where! You are in the presence of a lady, at least put your loincloth on!"

"What? Oh. Excuse me, Lady Tauriel. But I've come to regard you as one of the lads."

"That is nothing new for me, Fili. All the men in my King's service regard me as one of the lads, save Dragonkiller. And Morgana's brother is her equal in degeneracy."

"So you would never indulge?" Fili asked.

Cheekily, as he pulled on his breeches and pulled the laces shut.

Their ribald talk put Tauriel in a playful mood.

She winked at him, and Kili.

"Not unless I absolutely have to. Even I cannot live on starlight, alone."

Kili spit a great quantity of ale out of his nose.

Fili laughed, uproariously, and Tauriel laughed with him.

"You look like you might, Captain. Have they stopped feeding you, since we got here?' Fili asked.

"Things have been tense at my King's table, since your King has been dining with us. It's not very good for your appetite."

"Well, you've brought us enough food for a small army. Go on, eat something." Fili encouraged her.

"My manners are not very good. I'm not a noblewoman."

"That's good. Because ours are atrocious, when we're not made to mind them. Especially Kili's. Kili, get your hand out'r the fookin' eggs! Use your fork!"

Fili was sitting on the bed, so Tauriel sat in his chair.

She didn't see any harm in having a meal with Fili and Kili, after all.

* * *

Legolas brooded all day, and before the festival re-commenced that evening, he went for a long walk, to think and clear his mind, in the wake of his brother's disturbing words.

He was surprised to meet his father along a woodland path.

Not because Thranduil never went abroad in his woods, but because Legolas was sure that no one had followed him, and he had not followed the paved path.

In fact, he was walking along the path that led to the stately old oak that had sheltered him and Tauriel from prying eyes, when they lay there together on the soft grass.

So many years ago.

Dagnir had black hair, and he was sturdily built, and hairier than an Elf.

And she had cried out the raven-haired Dwarf's name, at the height of her passion.

Legolas guts' twisted; anger ripped through them like a virus.

"You look troubled, Legolas. As well you should be."

Legolas was in no mood to be admonished by his father, and whirled on him, angrily.

"Are you going to lecture me, too, that I am about to lose the woman I love to a Dwarf? You have no place to tell me so, father! It is your fault, and not mine, if I have lost Tauriel!" he accused.

"My fault? Tauriel was not even 400 when you asked my permission to marry her! And she's not of noble birth, and hasn't a drop of Sindari blood!"

"Says the son of Morgan le Fay, mother of all the Silvani, Thranduil the Stag King, with horns growing out of his head!"

"Antlers. You're my heir, Legolas. You will sit on my throne, after me, and your son or daughter after you. I can't just let you marry anyone, especially not an untried young girl! I am still considering your request, and as Tauriel grows into full womanhood, I am beginning to lean your way. And I said you didn't have my permission to marry her! I never told you to abandon her, completely, and send your brother to her bed in your stead, when the poor girl becomes so desperate that she can't bear it, any longer! You're my son, it's my blood in your veins, I know you're a man, not a marble effigy of one. You had better act like it, or you will lose your love, and I my ward and Captain to a Dwarf!"

"What kind of disorderly house do I inherit, that my own father talks to me like this?" Legolas persisted.

"Don't be such a puritan, Legolas! My wife and my concubines are under my roof, in my household, not under a Dwarf, under their Mountain because they have no reason to leave me. You are 1900 years old and already finished? I was 200 when I married your mother and 201 the year you were born. All my children but Estel and the child Ari carries were born by the time I was your age. Not to mention, your brother has two sons."

"Dagnir's mistress is a half-blood Dark Elf, and her mother was of the Hidden Folk!"

"You would speak of either race with derision? I am the shepherd of this forest, as you will be, someday, and every living creature on it! The Hidden Folk, too, are my people! And once there was a colony of Dark Elves, in my greenwood. They may return, if that dragon ever takes his leave! My stepmother, your Aunt Anorloth's mother came from that colony, she was a Dark Elf! And you have already presided over Tauriel getting far too familiar with a Dwarf. Worse, a Dwarf who is blood kin to Thorin Oakenshield and the sons of Cain! You have lost half of her affections, already! You will lose them, altogether at this rate!"

"What do you expect of me, Father!"

Thranduil swore under his breath.

He was beginning to lose his composure.

"I expect you to stop pouting and nancying and quimbying about, and to be a man! You are my son! Act like it!"

"What do you think I am, a bull or a stallion that you own, that you can command to rut, upon your word? I am my own man, father, not an animal you can put out to stud!"

"What I think is that Tauriel is a lovely young girl, and a fine soldier, and I expect that her fine sons and daughters should not have beards, and serve their Uncle Thorin! I expect that if you sit on your thumbs and dither, that I will steer Tauriel in the direction of your brother, Dragonkiller, to be his concubine! I will see my Captain of the Guards bound to one of my sons, I will take her as a mistress, myself, rather than lose her to Dwarves! You are my heir, Legolas! You must have heirs of your own! Damn it boy, this is business, this is the future of our realm, of our race!"

"I see well why you and Thorin Oakenshield were as brothers! Your minds are in the gutter, and your ambitions protrude no further than the tip of your cock!" Legolas shouted.

"At least ours protrude, lad! If you only use it to piss out of and hold up your hose, you might as well have it cut off, put on a gown and be my seventh daughter, rather than my first son!" Thranduil retorted.

Legolas tried to angrily brush past his father, but Thranduil swore, loudly, and in his ganger grabbed him by the arm and pulled his son back.

He thrust his face close to Legolas', and as it did when fury overtook him, the spell melted away from the Elvenking's face.

"Don't you even try to walk away from me while I'm talking to you, boy! I know that I am snickered at behind my back and there are those who mock me, asking how can one man love six women? Easily, if those six are your mother and your aunts. I have held myself up to ridicule for 1700 years for the women I love, and I would rather be thought of as faintly ridiculous than spend my life without them! You will not be so haughty, and so proud, and self-righteous when you have lost the one you love, forever! The world is not made of cold serene contemplation, and lofty deeds of courtly magnificence, it is made of flesh and blood, and so are you! Whether you would have it that way, or not!"

Legolas' serene brow furrowed.

"But what can I do, father? I see how close Tauriel is becoming with the archer! I envy him their camaraderie; it has been years since Tauriel and I could speak so freely and easily! If we were threatened by an attack of spiders, or orcs, or goblins, I would know what to do. If you changed your mind, tomorrow, and sent Dagnir and I stealthily, ahead of your prisoners, to kill the dragon on our doorstep, I would know what to do! But something like this, father? I am as furious as I am hurt, and I am at a loss for what I must do. The only thing I can think ofto do is to become angry and shout, or to beg forgiveness, or to do some of both. Which would be unseemly. So I have done nothing. And every day that I do nothing, say nothing, I drive Tauriel closer to the arms of another man. What strategy can I make, in a situation like this?"

Thranduil let his son go, and his scars were hidden again, as he walked with Legolas further down the earthen path.

"It's not a war, Legolas. You must do something you are loath to do. Show your true feelings."

"To Tauriel? You want me to make a fool of myself in front of her?"

"There is a word for men who will not make fools of themselves in front of women they have wronged, my son. Lonely. If you are angry, show her that you are. And if you want her forgiveness, ask. I don't know if you have brought yourself low enough to beg, but then again I have never kept a woman waiting for a century and a half. And you must stop worrying about what is unseemly. That is for courtiers and climbers. Not princes and kings. We have the privilege and the power to do what we like. Whether or not it's considered unseenmly."

"Not without consequence."

"No. Not without consequence. But I will take any consequence that is coming to me, rather than forfeit my privilege to do what I like. I am a man, and a King, and I will do my will, and damn the consequences, I say! You ought to try that way of thinking, lad. You would sleep better, and worry less."

"She has seduced Dagnir, Father, and called upon the Dwarf prince in her passion."

"Then you had better damn the consequences, and strike while the forge is still hot."

It took Legolas a moment to realize that his father had made an off-color joke, and he tried not to laugh, but he could not help himself.

"Then I might go to the palace now, and find Tauriel, and throw her over my shoulder and carry her to the nearest empty room with a locked door. For the forge of your ginger-haired Captain is always hot." Legolas chuckled.

Thranduil raised an eyebrow.

"I have long suspected as much, Legolas. We may thank our gods that it is not the raven-haired blacksmith that Tauriel finds herself infatuated with, for if there is a forge among the women of our race that he's not brought his hammer down in, then it is a mere and temporary oversight on Thorin's part. Neither his nephew, the junior Great Beast, or even the wolf Vargbrand himself can hope to approach Oakenshield's number of conquests. He is a randy old satyr, and might as well have horns on his head, but those of a goat! And it is his blood in the archer's veins, and that of the infamously debauched sons of Cain. Thorin bears me a grudge that have kept his Anorloth from him, and he would be glad to satisfy it by making sure that his nephew takes Tauriel from you. The wily old whoremaster is not above using his nephew's puppy love to his own ends. So you cannot merely swing your cock around and expect to win the day. You must turn your mind to plots and schemes, and come up with a plan more devious than any Thorin might have. To win Tauriel, Legolas, you must use your head, your heart, and swing your cock, and you must do it as I would if I were you. Do you understand, my son?"

Legolas thought on his father's words.

"Now I do, father."

"Good."

* * *

Tauriel had tried to put aside her baser feelings and befriend Kili.

He was very warm toward her, and very eager for her friendship.

And Tauriel did not realize how eager she was, for a man's friendship, that was warm and real and genuine.

They talked about all manner of things, but chief among them were hunting, scouting, and archery.

"Well I make my own arrows. By hand. I carved my own bow, too, and my brother, who is an apprentice blacksmith to my Uncle, he made the metal nocks. I've heard men who claim to be archers, talking about buying their arrows. Then they are not archers. I wish I had one of my arrows. I could explain myself, better."

"I have taken charge of your bow, and your arrows, Kili. For safe keeping. I admire your craft. It's nothing like anything I've made. I can barely fit one of your arrows to your bow. I needed to use both hands just to pick it up. You know, I always thought of Dwarves as little people. But you're not as little as I thought you would be. And you certainly make up for what you lack in height, in your strength! Especially your people, Kili. Morgana is six feet tall, and your brother could pick her up, with one arm, and throw her over his shoulder! And then there is the way you just pulled that iron bar out of this door, to do your exercises with. Did you even use two hands? And your Uncle? Why, his arms are as big around as an Elf's legs! I went to collect his dishes, and I had to ask him for the butter knife, as my King doesn't want any of you to have anything close to a weapon. He said it had probably gone under the bed. And he just lifted it up, with one hand, leaned over, got the knife and put the bed back down. There is a full-sized double bed in his room, with four posters! And damask bed-curtains."

"There is? And you mean that Kili and I have had to make do with four poster single beds? And cotton bed-curtains? My god, you Elves are fookin' inhumane!" Fili piped up.

"This is a private conversation, Fili!"

"Is it? About bows and archery? You could have this conversation with a man!"

"Don't you ever talk to women, Fili, apart from saying something filthy? But then again I suppose your conversations with Morgana the Witch are limited to screaming at her that she's going to drown you if she doesn't unlock her thighs from around your neck!"

"But what a way to go!"

"Fili!"

Alright! I'm not listening. Talk to this beautiful girl, who's mad about you, all about your bloody nocks! I'll just lie here on me bed and read."

From the next cell, Thorin laughed, and shouted something in Khuzdul.

"What did your Uncle say?"

"You don't want to know. And never mind my brother. He's got a one track mind. I have noticed that, too. About the difference in strength, in our peoples. You Elves are taller than we are, but, none of you are very, well, big. With the exception of my cousin Thalin, but he's half a Dwarf. And Dragonkiller, but he's Numenorian, in part. So, you may be a little taller than me, but I'm actually a lot bigger than you are. Stronger, too. I don't mean that as an insult, but that's the point I'm trying to make, about my bow. And yours. Every arrow and every bow ought to be made to suit the bowman. I use birch to make my arrows, and I forge my own arrowheads, too. The heads are flattened, but they are made of mithril steel, and I keep the flat edges sharp. Now, another archer would use a different bow, and a different sort of arrow. You can't just buy a bow and a score of arrows at a market and expect them to suit you. My bow is made to suit me. Your hands are too small for it. See?"

Kili reached for Tauriel's hand, through the bars.

She tried to act as if it didn't mean anything.

"I see. I could fit both my hands in one of yours."

"Strange. I thought your hands would be softer. But your palms are almost as tough as mine."

"I'm not a lady of leisure."

Tauriel did not ask him not to take her hand, but the next time they spoke, she reached for his hand, and Kili took hers.

The longer that Thranduil kept the Dwarves prisoner, the more it seemed to Tauriel that everything she had ever heard about their race was wrong.

She was their jailer, and she had come to know these 13 Dwarves as people, and they didn't seem so awful to her.

Especially Kili, with whom she had become friends.

They spoke every night, for as long as she dared.

And when Tauriel went back to sit in the chair by the guardhouse, she would listen to him play the violin, and sometimes he'd sing, too.

Kili never slept until the wee hours of the morning, when Fili came back to their cell.

And even though Fili could have stayed with Morgana, all the time, he didn't, because he knew his brother would pine for him, alone in the jailhouse.

Surely, the brothers decency and loyalty were proof enough that Dwarves were no lesser people than hers.

Thalin, who was Thranduil's nephew, and lived in his household was half a Dwarf, and quite obviously Thorin's son, he looked very much like him.

The last thing Tauriel expected though, was that she would be drawn into their conspiracy, and slowly, she was.

It was strange, to know them, as people, Dwarves.

Tauriel had heard of such folk, and she imagined them to be almost mythical, like pixies or nixies that buzzed through the air in the wood.

But just as, when she had met enough Men in her travels, she came to know that Dwarves were just that.

People.

They were a little shorter, and Dwarven men were built solid and burly, but they were not so different as she had been led to think they were.

Kili and his brother and Uncle were all tall for Dwarves, Thorin was nearly five foot four and so was Kili, and Fili was about five foot three.

Tauriel was only five feet and six, herself; they were not these ugly, mis-shapen things she had expected.

Only people.

But maybe it was her own infatuation with Kili that made her think in such a way.

He was beginning to look so impossibly strong, again, as he must have before the perils of Mirkwood, truly the Heirs of Durin had the constitution of oxen.

She often found him and Fili dueling with wooden swords they had made from the slats under their beds, to keep their skills up, and Kili was always awake when she came to bring them their breakfasts, pushing against the walls and the floor, running in place, she opened the door one morning and found he and Fili had attached an iron bar from who knew where across their doorway, and Kili was doing pull-ups.

Bare-chested.

"I have to get my strength back. I have a dragon to kill." He had told her.

Tauriel should not have been thinking it, but she wondered if the renewed strength that flowed through him had re-invigorated him, once more, as a man.

And why should it not, he was young and strong, and if Tauriel had never listened to women's stories about their rough and ready Dwarven lovers, burly, earthy men of considerable stamina, well-made and well-hung, she certainly recalled them, now.

Walking the hallways in the wee hours, Tauriel could think of little else.

"Tauriel!"

Why was Kili calling her?

They had already spoken, that night.

Was her thinking of her, too?

She went to his cell.

Kili's handsome face was glowing, and he squeezed both her hands and whispered a secret to Tauriel.

He did it impulsively, recklessly even.

Not realizing the effect it had on her, to have his lips so close to her ear, to feel his breath on her neck.

"We're going to be getting out of here, very soon! I know you won't tell."

"No, Kili. I won't. I'm glad to see that you and your people will go free."

"Will you remember me, Tauriel? And after we are established under the Mountain, again, and your King and my Uncle have had to mend their fences, and we can meet without bars between us, really, will you remember me?"

"Of course I will, Kili! You have become my…my friend. We will have to go hunting, together. Like I promised."

Kili smiled, so genuinely, and the expression in his deep brown eyes was so very warm that Tauriel nearly cried.

"I'm going to ask you something, now, that's probably going to make you slap me in the face."

"I might not."

"Well, there is the chance, the very good chance, that all you will be able to do is remember me. The desolation of dragons is dangerous work. Do you think you could unlock my door, and come in here, just for a moment…and I could kiss you goodbye? Just for good luck."

"Kili, I…I couldn't!"

"Why not? I didn't mean anything…serious."

"Yes you did! Anorloth has told me all about the kind of kisses to be had, from the men of your line! She said it is to have the very fires of Mahal's forged breathed into her soul, from the kiss on her lips of one of the Heirs of Durin!"

"Close your eyes, my lady fair. Think on the ravens, of my hair. And on your lips? My kiss will linger there. Until all time is done. And in my fire, you shall burn. Until by death? You are undone."

"Did your father write that? I don't know that one."

"That's because it's one of mine. Uncle Thorin told me about what Anorloth said. How she fell in love with him, the first time they kissed. It inspired me to write that little poem."

"For who?"

"A girl I haven't met, yet. Or at least, I hadn't met her. Until now."

"I couldn't, Kili. It has been so long that…"

"That what? That you are cold as marble and your blood has turned to dust? Well then your people say that a kiss from a mortal can give them new life, and breathe heat back into their cold blood, and fire into their stone hearts. Let me give you the gift of mortal fire. From the very forges of Mahal, that burn in the blood of the Heirs of Durin. Then, even if I am dead and gone, I know, you will never be able to forget me."

It had been almost a hundred and fifty three years since Tauriel had kissed a man whom she had deep feelings for.

But never had she kissed a Dwarf.

Tauriel unlocked the cell door, stepped in, and locked it behind her.

Kili drew her into his powerful arms, and held her fast.

"You don't feel cold to me, Tauriel."

"I lied?"

"I forgive you."

And he kissed her.

Kili's was not the kiss of a boy, who had never held a woman in his arms.

Make no mistake, he was a man.

And he did not give her a chaste kiss of friendship.

Kili knew and she knew that this was all there would ever be, between them.

He put all the feeling he had for her, into that one kiss.

When they parted, Tauriel felt like she might not be able to stand on her own two feet.

"Kili, I do feel it! I feel…fire! It's true! It's…that's not supposed to happen, just from a kiss."

She sat down in a heap on his bed, and Kili got his mug, from dinner and gave it to her.

Tauriel took a few sips of cold ale, and put the mug down.

"It is when the kiss is from me! I have been told that my kisses can steal the breath not just from your body, but from your soul. And since that is the only kiss from me you'll have, I tried to make it one of my very best. Now, what's not supposed to happen, just from a kiss?"

Kili winked at Tauriel, and grinned.

She did not want to laugh, but she did.

"You are just as wicked as your brother is, aren't you?" she asked.

"I can't help myself. It's in my blood."

Tauriel felt confused, and frightened, yet she was dazed with happiness and somewhat overwhelmed by lust.

Kili could have done what he liked with her, just then, at that moment.

But, he didn't.

"Don't you think you'd better go and check on the rest of your prisoners, Tauriel?"

"What? Oh, yes, of course. I, well, I…I'll see you tomorrow, Kili."

"I'll still be here. We're not leaving in that much of a hurry." He said.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that, too." Tauriel admitted.

She smoothed out her hair and her clothes before his and Fili's mirror, and locked Kili back in his cell.

* * *

With Tauriel's shift at its end, she went outside, to attend the festival.

It was a beautiful night, a full moon, and she laughed and danced and sang with her people in a happy daze.

Feeling as alive as if she were filled with the ageless fire of the stars.

But not every reveler at the feast was so merry.

"Having a good time without me, are you, Tauriel?"

Legolas grabbed her by her arm, and dragged her from the lighted pavilion, away from the path.

He had grabbed Tauriel, hard enough to hurt her, and his face was full of wrath, as he dragged her further into the wood.

Tauriel cried out in protest and dug her heels into the ground.

"What's the matter with you? Where are you taking me?"

"Do you think I would speak to you of this, where anyone could hear? I am humiliated enough that you've been throwing yourself at your Dwarf swain! At least my sister Morgana has the decency to take her lover to her bed! But a prison cell was good enough for you! Did you whore yourself for him, completely? Did you go on your knees before your hairy Dwarf, on the cold floor of my father's jail? And do not swoon, and tell me how you and your sweet prince made love, when I know, I know that you went to him the way a bitch on heat does to a wolf in the wood, for him to…to…to fuck you!"

Legolas spat his words at her, in a rage, and Tauriel struggled against him.

"Let me go, Legolas! I have done no such thing, I swear to you!"

"If you have not, then you will! Unless I stop you! And I could remind you of how I love you, how I have loved you, for some 400 years! I could tell you how deeply you have wounded me, in your faithlessness, but neither would matter to you! You are too much a Silvani, all fire in your blood and lust in your belly! If there is only one thing you understand, then you shall have it!"

Tauriel wrenched herself from his grasp, and Legolas pulled her back, and with as great of anger as if he had slapped her in the mouth, he kissed her.

She didn't resist.

Tauriel held her hand to her mouth in shock, then put her fingers on Legolas' lips, just for a moment.

He was surprised that she was smiling.

"Legolas, you have not kissed me for a hundred and fifty three years, four months, and twenty-one days!" she exclaimed.

She looked around.

"It's out tree! You've taken me to our tree!"

Tauriel threw her arms about Legolas' neck, and kissed him again.

There was so much of that fire in her kiss, the fire that she had already breathed into his blood; he very nearly lost himself.

He didn't think there would be any harm in kissing her, just once, but there was great harm in it, for all that was unquiet in his body remembered too well the taste and feel of her soft lips that she parted for him, so willingly…the sweet hunger of her warm mouth…the way she fell all over his chest, both yielding and demanding at the same time?

It was difficult to stick to his plan.

"Twenty-three days." He corrected her.

"I swear to you, I have done nothing with Prince Kili but befriend him. Is that so horrible?"

Legolas began to look angry, again.

The combination of his desire and his rage led him from his planned path.

"I can tell by the way you say his name that your feelings toward the Dwarf are more than those of friendship! And that you have done more than hold his hand, and talk to him about archery! Have I disappeared from your sight? From your mind? How could you do this to me? Do you not know, Tauriel, how I love you?"

Legolas shook her, and Tauriel grew angry, too, and shoved him away.

"Now you're angry again! That is all you ever are, anymore, to me? Either cold, or furious! I'll tell you what you've disappeared from! My bed! And if it shocks you that I should need, that I should want, that I should expect you to make the occasional appearance there, then be shocked! It has grown very cold, my bed, cold as your blood, in a hundred and fifty three years! Do you suppose that my blood is dust and that I have turned to stone, like you have? Now you act like a jealous fool, and speak to me of love, when for a hundred and fifty three years, all we have done is hunted, and warred and spoke of archery! Can I truly be faulted if I have warm feelings towards a handsome man, who sees me not as his vassal, but as a woman? If I enjoy being courted, if I like to hold hands, and flirt, and if I would dare dream of being held and kissed, to love and be loved, is that such a terrible crime?" Tauriel cried, in a voice of outrage.

"Be wary of what you say to me, Tauriel! I am not made of stone, nor is my blood turned to dust. I am my father's son, and it is his blood in my veins; it will never turn to dust! But I can never marry you. Never. And if father does change his mind, it will not be for another four hundred years!"

"You are the King's son, Legolas! You may do what you want! And your father is not married to five of the women he has sons and daughters with! Are they lonely? Are they cold? If I did not trouble you with requests of marriage in the past, why would I, now?"

"You do not understand. If I cannot marry you, I will never marry! Why give you, why give myself false hope? Go, then! Help him and his fellows escape, your fine Dwarf prince, and be released into the heaven of his love! His Uncle will marry my aunt, why should you not marry Thorin's nephew? Why should you not leave me, what am I to you, now that you have your Dwarrow lover?"

Legolas words were both sad and mocking.

"Must I give one of you up, to love the other? Must you give me up, because we may not marry? Do you really expect me to wait another four hundred years? Where is any of that written, in the laws of our people?"

Legolas laughed a sneering laugh.

"There is little of that kind of regulation, in the laws of our people." He said.

Coldly.

"Now you are not even angry, anymore! And to think I thought that you were dragging me into the wood, to our secret place, for some purpose other than to lecture me." Tauriel said, a little sadly.

"Have I driven you so low, in your desperation, Tauriel, that not only would you take a Dwarf for your lover, but that you would submit yourself to rape?" Legolas demanded.

He looked quite so lordly, and so shocked that Tauriel had to laugh.

"Rape? What rape? That implies a lack of willingness on my part, Legolas. Wrongly implies, I should say."

"Do not tempt me so, Tauriel! I will not be able to restrain myself!"

"You have restrained yourself for almost a hundred and fifty four years! We are alone here, in the wood. No one is here to see, and no one would ever know, if here, in our wood, by our tree, you restrained yourself no longer. You might blame the festive mood, or the full moon, or the ale you've drunk for your shocking lapse of chastity. And you may console yourself that, otherwise, never would you have done such a thing." Tauriel said.

"You want that I would not restrain myself? You want that I should take you for my concubine, as my father has taken my mother's sisters for his, marked them as his own in the wild need for him that he has burnt into their blood? That is what you want?"

Legolas spoke angrily, spitting his words at her, again.

She put her arms around his neck, and caressed the knotted muscles of his clenched jaw, gently.

"I am glad to have your friendship and your comradeship, Legolas. And I have not the words to tell you what it means to me that you still love me. But I too am alive, a woman, and not a marble statute. I want you to continue to be all you have been to me. But I need you, Legolas, I need you so desperately, to be a man to me! The way you once were. Yes, let the household hear me cry out for you, night after night, as we hear your father's wives crying out for him! Let me give you the fire in my blood, so that yours burns for me, for not another hundred and fifty years, but another hundred and fifty centuries!"

Legolas kissed her again, and held her hard against his body.

"You are the ruin of all I had planned to say to you, this night, of all I had planned to do. I forgot how you could make a fire in my blood, and drive all thoughts but my need for you quite from my mind. You have driven my blood far from my head, at the very least. Tell me, is it cold, or lifeless, what you feel between us, my Tauriel?" he asked her.

"I stand corrected, Legolas. Or rather, you do."

"I will make you regret, my little ginger girl, that you ever thought I was no longer a man! You will cry out for me far louder, woman, than my father's women do for him! I will love you, I will ravish you, I will make you scream my name, and you will forget that you ever looked at a Dwarf, and saw a man! Look on me! I am more man than any stunted, stocky, gnarled Dwarrow! You do not know fire, yet! You think you do, but you do not! But you will! I had mercy on you, in the past. I did not want to drive you made for love of me, as I have been mad, for four hundred years, for the love of you! But you will have no more mercy from me, Tauriel. I will make you to me what my father's women are to him! And until the end of time, Tauriel, oh yes, you shall burn!"

"I like these words better than any I've heard from you in a long time, Legolas. But you are still talking." She reminded him.

Legolas leaned his bow against the trunk of a tree, took off his quiver and put it beside his bow.

Then, he unbuckled his belt.

"What are you doing?" Tauriel asked.

Now he took off his surcoat, and hung it in the branches of the tree he had rested his weapons with.

"I am still talking. You have not pulled me by the buckle of my belt closer to the sweet hunger of your soft lips and your warm mouth, as you did my brother. But I am not insulted. Before the sun rises, I will satisfy all of your hungers. How do you like those words?"

He could see Tauriel tremble, and Legolas smiled.

He took off his tunic, hung it in the tree branches, leaned up against the trunk and pulled off his boots.

He laid on the ground the blanket he had brought from the pavilion.

"Legolas! You brought a blanket! You intended, all along, that you would have me!"

"I know that I might have had you any time I wanted, in all these years. I know I need not court you and hold your hand. You would strip yourself naked at a nod of my head, and I need only beckon you to have you. But I am just as much your fool, Tauriel. All you ever had to do was to come to me, and ask me to love you, and I would have been helpless to refuse."

Tauriel went over to the tree, and took off her weapons and laid them by Legolas'.

She meant to say something to him, something fine and romantic and yet smutty, like the things he was saying to her that made her weak with desire.

But that was not what she said.

"Legolas! You've grown hair on your chest! You never had before, just on your legs and…elsewhere."

"It's not very much. Do you like it, little wild one?"

Tauriel lost herself to desire, p ut her palms on Legolas' chest, and ran her hands over it, then she kissed his chest, her tongue lingering to recall to mind the taste of him.

When she touched and kissed him in such an intimate way, it coaxed a moan out of the Elf-Prince's throat, and he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, again.

This time, with as much passion as she had kissed him.

"Long have I missed you, my Tauriel. Long have I wanted you!"

Then, when they parted, Legolas unfastened her belt and her surcoat and pushed her surcoat off her shoulders.

While he hung her clothes with his, Tauriel took off her tunic and her boots, too, leaving her in her chemise and her hose.

They were face to face, again, and Tauriel lifted her arms for Legolas to take off her chemise.

She wasted no time pulling off her hose and stuffing them into one of her boots.

When she stood up, again, she saw that Legolas had spread out the blanket, and he had taken off his hose and his pantaloons.

She had almost forgotten how impossibly handsome he was, naked, in starlight.

"I say to you once more, look upon me, my Tauriel. Am I not more of a man than some stubby, stocky little Dwarf?"

He was smiling, now, not cold, or angry as he took her hand and they lay down together, on the soft green blanket, under the expansive arms of the ancient oak.

"I do not blame the night, or the moon, or the ale or the festival. I blame you, Tauriel. You have a way with leading me astray. And I am glad of it."

"What plans did you have in mind, Legolas?"

"They do not matter to me now. Whisper in my ear, my Tauriel, what you whispered to my brother. I want to hear you say it."

With her fists wound tightly in his hair the color of fine white wine and silver moonlight, Tauriel called out at the height of her passion, again and again.

Shouting Legolas' name to the stars.

The taste of that victory was very nearly as sweet to him as the taste of his little ginger girl.

A great lust took Legolas over, and for the first time in his life, he felt himself the heir or Morgan le Fay, the mother of the Hidden Folk and of the Sindari.

The Queen of the Wood and the Wild.

He was his father's heir, the heir to Morgan's magick, the shepherd of her forest, the son of the Stag King.

And the falseness of his spell of shame lifted from him.

"Legolas! You have antlers, too?"

"They have long been the source of my shame. But they will be no longer. Only when I am among men will I hide my birthright. I am the Prince of all that is of the Wood and the Wild. And someday, Little Wild One, you will be my Queen."

He and Tauriel passed the rest of the night, in consummation of that promise.

* * *

In the morning, Tauriel did not take over her shift in the jailhouse.

Dagnir didn't report it; he had a good idea of where she had got to.

But her absence was noted at breakfast, even if Legolas' wasn't; he had not been having his meals at table, these past few days.

But then the Elvenking found his son's bedchamber empty and his bed unslept in.

He took it upon himself to go looking for Legolas; even if he had stolen away with Tauriel, that was hours ago.

He looked along that dirt path they had walked a day or two before, and then followed a trail of bent grass and broken twigs to where he found his dignified heir lying on a blanket, wild-haired and naked, tangled up with his ginger-haired captain of the guards, both of them still sound asleep.

The girl slept in his arms, with her head resting on his chest, and the expression on her face was serene.

And even in his sleep, Legolas was smiling.

Thranduil carefully turned around and walked back the way he came.

"Good. Now I have the absolute allegiance of my Captain, and my son has regained his manhood, at last."

* * *

"Legolas, why? Why did you leave me in such a hurry, this morning? Why would you not talk to me all day?"

"Men say that my sister is the whore of the very Devil, and when they say it in front of me, they pay with a few broken teeth! But if they said it of you, Tauriel, I would agree! I took a vow, a solemn vow, on my honor, and you spun your web, and caught me in it! Taking me to our trysting place, when I'd had too much to drink!"

"What vow? I knew of no vow!"

"What would you care, even if you had! I know why my father doesn't want me to marry you! But he is a hypocrite for it, because even though he only sees as far as the tip of his cock, he condemns you! And you see nothing at all, you only grope your way along, led by ever twitch of your cunny! You have shamed us both!"

"Legolas!"

"Tears? Women like you have to learn not to cry! Go! Go and cry to your Dwarf! He doesn't know what kind of woman you are! Go and show him! Maybe to his kind, you are good enough! But I pity even him, if he is to besaddled with the likes of you!"

Tauriel ran from the King's household, down to the jail.

Legolas bit his lip, until it bled, so much did it pain him to wound Tauriel the way he had.

"Forgive me Tauriel, but this is the only way. The only way you can ever be mine. I would rather call a Dwarf my brother, than to never be able to call you my wife."

He went to the festival pavilion, to find his brother.

"Greenleaf! You look far too sober!"

"I am, Dagnir. And tonight, I need to become extremely drunk. Will you see to it that I get back to my bed?"

"Of course I will! What are brothers for?"

* * *

Tauriel was crying because she was confused as much as because she was upset.

She had spent the whole day and most of the evening weeping, off and on.

But she didn't want to show her sadness to Kili, so she tried to avoid him.

But he had the oak inner door open, and he was standing at the bars, watching her.

He grabbed her by her sleeve as she tried to hurry past him.

"Tauriel? Tauriel! You look as if you've been crying."

"Please, Kili. I can't talk to you, tonight!" Tauriel sobbed.

"You are crying! What happened? Can I help?"

Tauriel was going to say no, but she felt so wretched that she could not refuse the first kindness from a man that had been offered to her, all day.

She went over to Fili and Kili's cell, unlocked the door, locked it behind herself, slammed the oak door closed, and when they were alone, she sat down on the end of Kili's bed and put her face in her hands and cried bitter tears.

Kili sat beside her, and put his arm around her.

Quite literally, she cried on his shoulder.

"He has spurned me, again! But this time, with such cruelty! Acting as if I had done something wrong, when he took me off into the wood! He was so kind to me, by our tree, and said such sweet things to me. But this morning he was furious and brutal and cold! I am done, Kili, done with love! From now on, I'll be like Morgana! Many men may touch me, but none will touch my heart!" Tauriel sobbed.

"Don't say things like that, Tauriel! You still have me."

"But you don't know what I did!"

"I think I do."

"Then you must hate me for it!"

"How can I hate you for loving a man you have loved since before I was born? For trying to mend your fences with him? It doesn't seem odd to me; most women of my race have two suitors who become their two husbands. But I can hate him, for treating you this way! I've heard of girls thinking better of it, come the morning, and taking a man to task for it, making him feel as if he had shamed and wronged them. But never the other way around!"

"I should have stayed with you, Kili. You would never treat me with such contempt!"

"I wanted you to stay. I knew that you would have. But thought I would be taking advantage of you, if I didn't let you go."

"I was taken advantage of anyway, and then I was blamed for it!"

"Maybe you ought to try and speak to your Elf-prince…"

"…I will on a hot day in deepest Nifleheim! I am talking to the man I want to talk to. And I have locked myself away from the world with the man I want to be with! Kiss me again, Kili. I want you to."

"Then I would be taking advantage of you, as wretched as you are right now!"

"Kili, you have a fine and noble heart. But the festival is very nearly over. I know that any escape you might try would hinge on our festival as a distraction. So, you do not take advantage of me, Kili, rather we will take advantage of the little time we have together! I think it was you I wanted all along, I really do! Now kiss me, again, before I die of wanting you to! " Tauriel demanded.

Kili gave in to temptation, and holding Tauriel close against his chest, he kissed her, passionately.

Madness grabbed Tauriel by the throat.

And she grabbed Kili by his tunic.

Some of his buttons came undone, and Tauriel could not help but run her hands over that of Kili's naked chest that was suddenly exposed.

Now that was a man's chest.

Broad, muscular, and hairy.

She kissed him, just under his collarbone, breathing in his strong, unfamiliar, delicious scent.

Kili made a low, rumbling sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a snarl, and pressed her head against his chest.

Tauriel felt a terrible, insistent, ardent throb between her thighs that had nothing to do with romance, and little to do with love.

She wriggled her body around so that both of her legs were wrapped around Kili's thigh, and he put both of his hands on her arse, and pulled her closer such that the seam of her hose pressed against the ever more insistent bulge under his tunic at the laces of his breeches.

Lust.

It was lust, a welcome stranger after all these years, like a breath of fresh air into a room that has been shut up for too long.

And in that moment of her mad lust, the she-Elf squirmed against the Dwarf prince, and he kissed her again.

"Mahal, Tauriel, I am just a man, you can't kiss me like that, and rub your little ginger quim all over me cock, and torture me! If you're going to go, you had better go, right now!" Kili panted.

"I don't want to go! Especially not when you…when you say things like that! Tonight? Will you and your Company leave, tonight?"

Tauriel hardly recognized the breathy snarls coming from her throat as her own voice.

"Tomorrow. Why?"

"You know why! Do I have to say it to you?"

He made that snarling sound, pushed his tunic aside, and kissed her again, this time aggressively rubbing his…_go on, think it, you know what it is, Tauriel, his cock, his big, heavy, hard, savage Dwarf warrior's warhammer cock_ against just what he knew was the right spot along that seam of her hose that…

No…

Oh no…

Tauriel dug her fingers into Kili's shoulders, and buried her face against his chest, biting her lip to keep in the sounds that wanted to fly out, as the unexpected jolt of pleasure almost embarrassed her, with its suddenness and keenness.

"Mahal, oh Mahal who made me, woman, a thousand years from now they will write poems about how I am going to fuck you, this night…you have to tell me!" Kili groaned.

"Kili…. I…I want you to take me. To make love to me…"

_Say it, Tauriel._

_For once in the 600 years of your dutiful life, do something wild._

_Something Morgana would do._

_Morgana would say it._

_And Morgana would do it, too._

_If you can't say it, then you can't do it._

_A hundred and fifty three years is a long, long, long time. _

_When do you think your next chance is going to be?_

She sat up in his lap, and pressed her lips against Kili's ear.

Because she couldn't say it loudly.

She just couldn't.

"Oh Kili, my own warrior-poet, I want you to fuck me! Make me forget that I was ever known to any man but you!" she whispered.

Desperately.

It was like waving a black flag in front of a warg.

Kili rolled Tauriel over on her back, and kissed her again, and then he reared up off of her, took off his tunic and threw it aside.

He was breathing in heavy, panting gasps through his parted lips, his nostrils flared and his eyes were alight with a greedy, mad hunger.

Kili started unlacing his breeches, and Tauriel realised, with another of those terrible, insistent, ardent throbs that if she didn't take her clothes off in a hurry that Kili was simply going to rip them from her body.

She almost hoped he would.

"Fuck!"

He said the word in an ugly fashion, and got up out of the bed, and started going through the pockets of his cast-off surcoat.

"What happened? Did I do something wrong?"

"No. I'm looking for my sheath! Son of an orc's warg… where the fuck did I put you?! Oh, Tauriel, I'm so sorry! But I didn't think…where is it? By all the gods, I hope I remembered to wash it!"

_His what?_

_Dwarves used sheaths?_

The last time they had lain together, Dragonkiller refused to bother with a sheath; she had refused to let him inside her, and satisfied him with her mouth, after he had satisfied her with his, but he had been drunk and she had been too yielding, and although he promised he would not spend himself in her, he had, and a very tense cycle from full moon to full moon passed her before her worst fears were not realized.

He was an Elf, the son of her king, the half-brother of the crown prince, her best-friend's brother, with whom she had grown up, and Dragonkiller had little enough regard for her to recklessly spend his seed in her and then fall asleep.

Even if he had apologized, and promised to acknowledge the child as his, with no shame, and help her raise it, what good would that do if he'd made her another brood mare in Thranduil's stable?

And this Dwarf, whom she had known for all of a month, had torn himself away from the height of his passion, mindful that he should get her with child, and then die, and leave her to shame.

"Kili, even if your Uncle was not a King, and your father not a prince, even if they were commoners, you would still be a prince, among all men, of all races!"

She wasn't sure if he heard her, but he found what he was looking for.

"There you are !"

Kili had a little blue velvet bag in his hand that he placed on the table as he got back into bed.

"You don't need it now? The sheath?"

Tauriel's hands were shaking so badly that she couldn't get under the sheets, but Kili didn't want her under the sheets, he wanted to see her body.

He got into bed, and closed the bed-curtains.

He grinned at her, mischieviously.

"No. Not yet. I don't think you would like the taste of the sheath, my Tauriel."

Tauriel blushed a deep red at the arousing implications of his reply.

But even so, not only was Tauriel naked, Kili was naked.

And he looked more naked than any man she had ever seen without his clothes.

The whorls of silky black hair on his thick, muscular thighs.

The luxuriant black beard from which, in defiance of her every fantasy of just how big a man might be, his savage warhammer sprung.

Morgana.

Shouting through the walls at Fili that she wanted him sunk into her cunny, and she shouted that word, and she shouted this too, up to his ten-gallon bollocks.

Tauriel could see what she meant.

"Oh, Kili, I think…I think I might…break apart…just looking at you!" she gasped.

Whether bravely or wantonly, Tauriel put one hand on his manhood, then the other, and she could not touch her thumb and her forefinger together.

But still the mighty crown wasn't covered by both her hands.

Both her hands.

Tauriel felt and heard a sob tear out of her throat.

"We're not going to break apart, my Tauriel. We'll come, together."

Directly—

-immediately, now-

did they proceed to the 69th page of the _12 Nights of the Sindari._

_-one of the best pages-_

Into such exotic waters she had never ventured with Legolas, and once with Dagnir, but only successfully for her, but with Kili, Tauriel even relished every moment that they squirmed and swore and jostled around, until they found the just right position…

…and lulled into a sweet, dirty trance of tongue and cock, they moved together, in the most sublime and yet the most extravagantly filthy position that Tauriel had ever imagined, and in the most sublime and yet the most extravagantly filthy way she might have imagined it.

Dirty and desperate, Tauriel's only regret once they were done,

-wiping her reddened lips swollen with passion upon the sheets—

Was that it was all over.

"Oh, Kili, that was a most wonderfully awful thing for us to do. It makes me feel positively filthy. But in the best possible way."

"It's meant to, I think." Kili replied.

He kissed her, and right on the lips, too, and just when she was thinking on how daring that was, how not even Dagnir would kiss her on the lips after she had done THAT to him, Kili reached out to the table for the little velvet bag.

"But Kili…" she said.

Lounging deep into the mattress, so casual with deep satisfaction.

"But Kili, aren't you already…finished?"

"Finished? How could I be finished when you asked me, begged me, so prettily to fuck you, and I haven't done it yet?"

"But you did." Tauriel replied.

Petulantly.

Another kiss, this one deeper and more languorous than the one before, and clearly meant to arouse her passions, once again.

"No, my little ginger wood nymph, I licked you. And stroked you. And fingered you. But I have not fucked you."

Those mere words made Tauriel shudder with pleasure, as she thought of the acts they described.

Kili leaned over her and kissed her again.

Twice

Two kisses, one on each nipple.

And a wink and a smile.

"Yet."

"Why do I like it so well when you say dirty words to me in Westron?"

"I only know that you like it. You like it all, don't you?"

_I wish I could say dirty words back to him._

_I want to, but I can't_.

"I do. Kiss me like that, again, Kili. You do it so well."

The touch of his hands on her breasts was maddening, and Tauriel felt the way he suckled at her nipples as if he had his silver tongue between her legs, again.

But oh, oh no, the feeling of that silver tongue, painting quick little circles around each nipple; it was almost better.

Tauriel held Kili's head against her breast, absolutely helpless with lust.

"You have not yet, but I want you to!"

_Try to say something dirty._

_Go on, try_.

"I want you, Kili, I need you!"

_Well, that was a good start._

Oooo, lovely, though, it was a pleasure to take him in her arms as he mounted her, just to have him on top of her, and his big, strong body between her legs.

Arms around him too, and she wound her legs around his waist.

"Kiss me again, Kili, oh please."

"Anything you want."

He kissed her again.

Her lips were close to his ear again as he kissed her neck, his calloused fingertips rolling her nipples, the way he had rolled them between his lips.

Nimble silver tongue, too.

And his hair was all sweaty.

But her lips were close to his ear again.

And she could whisper it.

What did Anorloth say…

Oh yes, an appropriate animal.

"Do it now, my raging bull! I want your fine big cock I want ALL of it, every inch inside me and don't fuck me like I've never had a man before by all your savage gods I need a man a man like you…"

Kili had one hand against the wall and he slipped the other under her arse, and lifted her into his first thrust.

Tauriel had never been frigid, but she felt as though she must have been, before, compared to the way it made her feel.

"Like that?" he asked her.

"Like that! Just like that!" Tauriel cried.

She continued to hiss and sob and whisper a long, lovely, liberating stream of dirty words first in Kili's ear, and then, just whispering them while he did it, while he did, while he, oh, go on and think it Tauriel, while he fucked her good and hard with his…his cock, his big, heavy, hard, savage Dwarf warrior's warhammer cock…

…and for some reason, Kili put his hand over her mouth, but she was so close to the height of her passion, an absolute height she had never been brought to before, and all she could think of was that she hoped he wouldn't stop.

He took his hand away from her mouth.

"Don't stop, Kili, please don't stop, I'll die if you do…"

"You know I won't stop. Not if you come for me, my Tauriel. Give me all your lust in all its fury, squeeze my cock and hold me hard between your legs, scream for me and drown me in the ocean of your love!"

Now those were very sweet words, indeed, upon which to come and come and come your brains out, the way you have only done before in your half-remembered dreams.

"Good girl, now that's the way you fuck a man when you want him to come…"

Kili let out a long, low moan, and even though he had the sheath on, he pulled his cock out of her.

And Tauriel shocked herself, as the words flew from her lips, all unbidden.

"Take it off, and spill your seed on me, oh, how I want you to!"

Kili pulled the sheath off and she watched him, watched the look on his face, and watched his body jerk and twitch and stiffen and his cock too, as he spilled his seed on her breasts and her belly.

That, of itself was just, wonderful.

Kili rolled over onto his back.

"Don't move. I think I can reach it from here."

He kissed her, quickly, and reached for the cloth on the nightstand.

He dipped the cloth from the nightstand into the basin of water, and cleaned her up with one end, and dried her off with the other.

He tidied himself up a bit, too, and put the cloth back, and then they were under the blankets and she was in his arms.

For a long time, neither of them spoke, or dared even move.

"You have such a strange look on your face, Tauriel."

"As if I were surprised?"

"Yes."

"I am surprised, I know it sounds trite, but I've never felt that way before, with a man. I always thought, well, there was only so much a man could do for you, and then there was, well…"

"What?"

"I should not say. But I suppose, now that we are lovers…well, what you could do for yourself, because you know your own body better than anyone does. But I was wrong."

"I can solve that mystery for you. I always heard that the men of your race were beautiful and cold, but now that I'm among them, I can see that rather, they are vain and conceited, and they take their women for granted. Now, among my race, vanity and conceit is considered unmanly in men, and unbearable in women. And we Dwarrows don't take women for granted, because we have precious few of them. If a man wants to hold onto a woman, he had better be a good listener, a good provider, a good friend, and a fookin' satyr of a lover, or she'll find someone else. That's just the way it is for us. Just like Elf men think they're so grand and so pretty and so far above the rest of the world that they imagine their women swoon at the sight of them, let alone the touch."

"What about our King?"

"Well, he knows he's not pretty, even if he is the King. I'll bet when he was a young man, before he learned to cover those scars, he had to work to find himself a woman. And you don't forget how, do you?"

"No. You don't. I'll go, in a moment. I know that I must."

"Stay, Tauriel. Until Fili comes back. He'll wake us."

"I can't. But tell me, Kili, why did you put your hand over my mouth?"

"You were screaming very dirty words at the top of your lungs in common Westron! I didn't want them all to hear you, and know what we've been up to."

"I was? Well, did you like it?"

"Yes."

One more kiss and then?

…uh-oh!...

Beautiful oblivion.

* * *

As usual, Bombur was snoring and Dwalin was snoring, but other than that it was quiet in the jailhouse.

But when Fili got to his cell, the door was wide open.

And the night before the escape, too!

_Well, better late than never, little brother._

Quietly, he closed it.

And made a face, waving his hand under his nose.

"Durin's beard, it smells like a Breeland whorehouse in here!" he muttered.

There were clothes all over the floor.

Fili gathered Kili's up, and shoved them under the bed.

Tauriel's he put under his arm.

A skinny little Elvin foot stuck out from the bed-curtains, and, holding in a large laugh, Fili pulled on it.

"Tauriel? Tauriel! Time to go home to your own bed, love."

He threw her clothes through the curtain and stood by the door, looking out into the night, as his jailer and his brother whispered and swore and fumbled around, getting her dressed.

On wobbly legs, Thranduil's brave Captain made her way to the cell door.

"How do I look?" she asked Fili.

"Like you've thrown on your clothes in the dark at three in the morning after you've just had your brains fucked out all night. Lock us in, and take the back stairs, hurry up and get to your room and washed up and into bed before anyone's the wiser. Loki's fire, Tauriel, you are a pretty girl!"

There was something about a pretty girl, all flushed and tumbled and screwed into a state of sleepy, absolute satisfaction.

Something that kept Fili from ever getting a wink of sleep when he went to bed with a woman.

You could do it to her all over again, when she was in that state, no matter how hard you'd had to work to win her favors, and she'd just put her arms and her legs around you, and moan and coo and sigh.

Moan and coo and sigh and spurt all over your balls.

Suddenly, Fili wasn't tired, and his tightened up, ready to swing back into action.

He put both his hands on the side of her face.

"Don't." Tauriel said, her voice lacking conviction.

"And you really mean that, do you? I know you don't. It's all the same, love, I'm Kili's brother, after all. I wouldn't mind keeping you in the family. But, my little brother, he truly loves you. Or else I would. Right now. And we both know that you wouldn't stop me. " Fili told her.

He couldn't resist, he kissed Tauriel full on the lips, and when she turned to leave he smacked her on the arse.

She was in too much of a happy daze to notice which brother was bidding her a fond goodbye, and upon checking on Kili, Fili discovered that he was all in.

He got the basin from the washstand, and the washrag and the towel, pulled the covers off of Kili, washed him down, rolled him over, washed him down on the other side, dried him off, rolled him back over and dried him off again, then put the covers over him.

"You'll be alright, little brother. You just overdid it a bit. Drink the rest of this ale, I'll bet you're thirsty. And my mug, too. So, when's our wedding?"

"If you touch her, I'll chop your cock off with a butter knife."

"Oho, you are in love! Well, our Uncle's married to an Elf, he's got nothing to say to you."

"What about Morgana?"

"We've made other arrangements, Morgana and I. No, if we survive this, I am going to marry a Took."

"Who?"

"What do you mean, who? How many Tooks do I have two daughters and a son with? Bilbo's younger cousin, Marigold Brandybuck, of course. I'm going to make an honest woman of her, and give Ivy and Holly and Thrain my name. If you think Elves are something, forget it. No matter where your roam, and in what corner of Middle Earth you look, there's no woman as hot or as fine as a Tuckborough Took. How's that for fookin' poetry?"

"But do you love her?"

"We've got three children, little brother. Do you suppose I don't?"

He laughed at his younger brother's look of confusion.

"Durin's short and curly beard, you really don't understand anything, do you, Kili? Get some sleep, anyway. You've earned it."

Fili took off his robe, washed up, and went to bed.

* * *

Thorin slept lightly, and when he heard running feet along the corridor, he woke up.

He crept out of Anorloth's bed, and opened the door of the bedchamber.

There was Captain Tauriel, her hair all loose and flying behind her, running down the corridor, barefoot, with her boots in her hands.

Thorin chuckled, as he shook his head and shut the door.

"What is it, Thorin?"Anorloth asked.

"Nothing. Only that I would not want to be young and stupid, again. Not for all the gold in all the undiscovered mines of Middle Earth." Thorin said, as he got back into bed.

"Thorin, you will return to me, won't you?"

"Do you think a wurm can kill me, Ani? After the life I've had? I will see that foul creature dead, and I will piss in his eyes as he sinks into the long lake. But before he's submerged, I'll have you, knees up and knickers down, on his back, before his blood has gone cold in his veins. And that very night, you will enter the halls of Erebor, as its Queen."

"And you will have the satisfaction of entering your Queen, in the halls of Erebor, isn't that so?"

"Do you think your brother would dare to try and beat me back to the dungeons, with an axe-handle, if I was to make you scream twice as loud as Fili made Morgana?"

"You want to give the old ponce something to think on, as you make your escape? I think it's a fine plan. Come closer, and we'll put it into action."

* * *

Legolas had stayed up late, sitting in the shadows of the Elvenking's parlor, waiting for Tauriel.

But he let her pass him, in the dark, without speaking.

He knew, when he saw her, that his unexplained and undeserved cruelty had driven her into the Dwarf's arms.

But that did not break Legolas, or convince him that all was lost.

It made his resolve all the stronger.

Everything was going according to his plan.

If Tauriel married a Dwarf, she would be considered by the Dwarves to be one of them.

Under their laws, because there were so few women, a woman was permitted to be married to two men.

And if Tauriel was a married woman, in the shoes of a married Dwarf woman, and she wanted to marry him, then what did the Elvenking have to say about her choice?

Especially if, as Legolas suspected, Thorin Oakenshield would regain his kingdom, and he and Thranduil would be allies again.

Legolas had observed the two Kings, and they were scarcely able, despite the grievances between them, to keep up their bitter enmity while in each other's company.

They would be glad, for more than one reason, to have their friendship and their alliance renewed, and if Thranduil was to balk at Legolas marrying the same woman as Kili had, Thorin would definitely consider it an insult.

Legolas would have his father over a barrel.

For the first time in 400 years, faint hope sprang anew in Legolas' heart.

And, for truly he was the son of Thranduil, quietly, patiently, methodically, the Elf-prince began to plot.

And plan.

And scheme.

What, he asked himself, would be my father's next move?

* * *

Even though it was ridiculous of her, Tauriel hid herself under the foam on the surface of her tub, when Legolas burst into the bathroom she shared with Morgana and Dagnir.

"Legolas, you have to leave! At once! I am not dressed!"

He sat down, beside the tub.

"I was hoping you would not be. I came to beg for your forgiveness."

"You're drunk, are you not?"

"Very. But even if I were sober, I would be contrite. I know that I have been a fool, and driven you into the arms of another. But there is no life for me, without your love. Forgive me, Tauriel! As you said, there is no law of our people that says you must forsake your love for one man, to love another."

"But Legolas, you hate Dwarves!"

"I do not hate Thalin, do I? I will think on your prince as Thalin's cousin. I will get used to it, with time. I must!"

Said Legolas in a brave and stalwart tone.

"Well, right now, you must go back to your room! I am tired and I want to go to bed and get some sleep."

"Tired? Your cheeks are flushed, your breath is short, and there is hellfire in your eyes. I believe you want to go back to bed, but not that you would sleep. And I am not tired, at all. Which is all your fault. Warriors who awaken sleeping dragons must learn to contend with fire."

Tauriel got out of the bath, and hurriedly wrapped herself in a large towel.

"You're up to something, Legolas. I know you. "

He took the towel from her with one arm and pulled her against his chest with the other.

"I am up to many things, my Tauriel. Time to get you to your bed."

"But I have guard duty in the morning."

"Dagnir will switch shifts with you. I have already asked him. Are you through protesting, now?"

"Yes."

"Good."

"Are you going to tell me what you're plotting and scheming about, or do I have to find out?"

Legolas only smiled.

He put the towel around Tauriel again, picked her up, and carried her out of the bathroom.

_**(Author's Note: Oho, it seems everyone is up to something! Legolas has a scheme, Thranduil has his own motives, Thorin and Company are planning an escape with Anorloth and Thalin, and Bilbo is keeping an eye on those barrels while Dagnir moves the Dwarves' weapons into place. And that valiant rascal and one-man armoury, Fili, he's trying to insert himself into the situation with Tauriel, wherever he can fit in. It seems as though the only people who don't have a plot afoot are Kili and Tauriel. They're in love. And they DID, didn't they? The question is, do the best laid plans of Dwarves and Elves often go astray? Find out in the next chapter, in which, among other things, we will find out about all the work Bilbo's been at while all this hanky-panky was going on.)**_


End file.
